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THE POEMS AND PROSE OF ERNEST DOWSON 



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Modern Library. 



THE 

POEMS AND PROSE 

OF 

ERNEST DOWSON 

MEMOIR BY ARTHUR SYMONS 



BONI AND LIVERIGHT 



PUBLISHERS .-. ;. NEW YORK 



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Copyright, 1919, 
By Boni & Liveright, Inc. 

Beque 
Albert Adsit demons 
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Printed in the U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Memoir. By Arthur Symons T 



POEMS 

In Preface: for Adelaide T g 

Coronal 23 



Verses: 

Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration ...... 24 

Villanelle of Sunset 26 

My Lady April 27 

To One in Bedlam 28 

Ad Domnulam Suam 20 

Amor Umbratilis ? Q 

Amor Profanus . . 31 

Villanelle of Marguerites 32 

Yvonne of Brittany 33 

Benedictio Domini • • 35 

Growth 35 

Ad Manus Puellae 37 

Flos Lunae 33 

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae . . 39 

Vanitas • 40 

Exile 4I 

Spleen 42 

O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem 

habenti in substantiis suis 43 

"You would have understood me, had you waited" . 44 

April Love 4 ,- 

v 



CONTENTS 
Verses: page 

Vain Hope 46 

Vain Resolves ^~x 47 

A Requiem 48 

Beata Solitudo 49 

Terre Promise 50 

Autumnal 51 

In Tempore Senectutis . . 52 

Villanelle of his Lady's Treasures 53 

Gray Nights 54 

Vesperal 55 

The Garden of Shadow 56 

Soli cantare periti Arcades 57 

On the Birth of a Friend's Child 58 

Extreme Unction 59 

Amantium Irae 60 

Impenitentia Ultima 61 

A Valediction 6$ 

, Sapientia Lunae 64 

jj " Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad" . . .65 

Seraphita 67 

Epigram 68 

Quid non speremus, Amantes? 69 

Chanson sans Paroles 70 

The Pierrot of the Minute 71 

Decorations: 

Beyond "... 97 

De Amore 98 

I The Dead Child 100 

Carthusians 101 

The Three Witches 103 

Villanelle of the Poet's Road .104 

h - Villanelle of Acheron 105 

vi 



CONTENTS 
Decorations: page 

Saint Germain-en-Laye 106 

After Paul Verlaine — I 107 

After Paul Verlaine — II . . 108 

After Paul Verlaine — III . . . . . . . .109 

After Paul Verlaine — IV . . .110 

To his Mistress in 

Jadis 112 

In a Breton Cemetery 113 

To William Theodore Peters on his Renaissance Cloak 114 

The Sea-Change 115 

Dregs 116 

A Song 117 

Breton Afternoon 118 

Venite Descendamus . . . .119 

Transition . 120 

Exchanges 121 

To a Lady asking Foolish Questions . . . . .122 

Rondeau 123 

Moritura 124 

Libera Me 125 

To a Lost Love 126 

Wisdom 127 

In Spring 128 

A Last Word 129 

PROSE 

The Diary of a Successful Man 133 

A Case of Conscience . . . , 150 

An Orchestral Violin 165 

Souvenirs of an Egoist 187 

The Statute of Limitations 210 



ERNEST DOWSON was 
born in 1867 at Lea, in Kent, 
England. Most of his life was 
spent in France. He died 
February 21, 1900. 

The poems in this volume 
were published at varying in- 
tervals from his Oxford days 
at Queens College to the time 
of his death. The prose works 
here included were published 
in 1886, 1890, 1892 and in 
1893. 



ERNEST DOWSON 



The death of Ernest Dowson will mean very little to 
the world at large, but it will mean a great deal to the 
few people who care passionately for poetry. A little 
book of verses, the manuscript of another, a one-act 
play in verse, a few short stories, two novels written in 
collaboration, some translations from the French, done 
for money; that is all that was left by a man who was 
undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but a 
poet, one of the very few writers of our generation to 
whom that name can be applied in its most intimate 
sense. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of 
what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the 
factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare 
moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will 
see only a literary affectation, where in truth there is as 
genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the more ex- 
plicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. 
Yes, in these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song,, 
I find, implied for the most part, hidden away like a 
secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained 
dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift, 
disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius. 

Ernest Christopher Dowson was born at The Grove, 
Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent, on August 2nd, 1867; he died 
at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Catford, S.E., on Friday morn- 
ing, February 23, 1900, and was buried in the Roman 

Co 



ERNEST DOWSON 

Catholic part of the Lewisham Cemetery on February 
27. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, Browning's 
"Waring," at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand, 
and author of "Ranolf and Amohia," and other poems. 
His father, who had himself -a taste for literature, lived 
a good deal in France and on the Riviera, on account of 
the delicacy of his health, and Ernest had a somewhat 
irregular education, chiefly out of England, before he 
entered Queen's College, Oxford. He left in 1887 with- 
out taking a degree, and came to London, where he lived 
for several years, often revisiting France, which was al- 
ways his favourite country. Latterly, until the last year 
of his life, he lived almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, 
and Normandy. Never robust, and always reckless with 
himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for 
some years, and when he came back to London he looked, 
as indeed he was, a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a 
sensitive independence which shrank from any sort of 
obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, 
who would gladly have helped him, or with any of the 
really large number of attached friends whom he had in 
London; and, as his disease weakened him more and 
more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, re- 
fused to see a doctor, let himself half starve, and was 
found one day in a Bodega with only a few shillings in 
his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to walk, 
by a friend, himself in some difficulties, who immediately 
took him back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy 
outskirt of Catford, where he was himself living, and 
there generously looked after him for the last six weeks 
of his life. 

He did not realise that he was going to die; and was 
full of projects for the future, when the £600 which was 
to come to him from the sale of some property should 
have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to 

(2) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

read Dickens, whom he had never read before, with 
singular zest; and, on the last day of his life, sat up 
talking eagerly till five in the morning. At the very 
moment of his death he did not know that he was dying. 
He tried to cough, could not cough, and the heart quietly 
stopped. 

II 

I cannot remember my first meeting with Ernest Dow- 
son. It may have been in 1891, at one of the meetings 
of the Rhymers' Club, in an upper room of the "Chesh- 
ire Cheese," where long clay pipes lay in slim heaps 
on the wooden tables, between tankards of ale; and 
young poets, then very young, recited their own verses 
to one another with a desperate and ineffectual attempt 
to get into key with the Latin Quarter. Though few 
of us were, as a matter of fact, Anglo-Saxon, we could 
not help feeling that we were in London, and the atmos- 
phere of London is not the atmosphere of movements or 
of societies. In Paris it is the most natural thing in the 
world to meet and discuss literature, ideas, one's own 
and one another's work; and it can be done without pre- 
tentiousness or constraint, because, to the Latin mind, 
art, ideas, one's work and the work of one's friends, are 
definite and important things, which it would never oc- 
cur to any one to take anything but seriously. In Eng- 
land art has to be protected not only against the world, 
but against one's self and one's fellow artist, by a kind 
of affected modesty which is the Englishman's natural 
pose, half pride and half self-distrust. So this brave 
venture of the Rhymers' Club, though it lasted for two 
or three years, and produced two little books of verse 
which will some day be literary curiosities, was not quite 
a satisfactory kind of cenacle. Dowson, who enjoyed the 

(3) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

real thing so much in Paris, did not, I think, go very 
often; but his contributions to the first book of the club 
were at once the most delicate arid the most distin- 
guished poems which it contained. Was it, after all, 
at one of these meetings that I first saw him, or was it, 
perhaps, at another haunt of some of us at that time, a 
semi-literary tavern near Leicester Square, chosen for its 
convenient position between two stage-doors? It was 
at the time when one or two of us sincerely worshipped 
the ballet; Dowson, alas! never. I could never get him 
to see that charm in harmonious and coloured movement, 
like bright shadows seen through the floating gauze of 
the music, which held me night after night at the two 
theatres which alone seemed to me to give an amusing 
colour to one's dreams. Neither the stage nor the stage- 
door had any attraction for him; but he came to the 
tavern because it was a tavern, and because he could 
meet his friends there. Even before that time I have a 
vague impression of having met him, I forget where, 
certainly at night; and of having been struck, even 
then, by a look and manner of pathetic charm, a sort of 
Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats, and 
by something curious in the contrast of a manner ex- 
quisitely refined, with an appearance generally some- 
what dilapidated. That impression was only accentu- 
ated later on, when I came to know him, and the man- 
ner of his life, much more intimately. 

I think I may date my first impression of what one 
calls "the real man" (as if it were more real than the 
poet of the disembodied verses!) from an evening in 
which he first introduced me to those charming supper- 
houses, open all night through, the cabmen's shelters. I 
had been talking over another vagabond poet, Lord 
Rochester, with a charming and sympathetic descendant 
of that poet, and somewhat late at night we had come 

(4) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

upon Dowson and another man wandering aimlessly and 
excitedly about the streets. He invited us to supper, we 
did not quite realise where, and the cabman came in 
with us, as we were welcomed, cordially and without 
comment, at a little place near the Langham; and, I 
recollect, very hospitably entertained. The cooking dif- 
fers, as I found in time, in these supper-houses, but there 
the rasher was excellent and the cups admirably clean. 
Dowson was known there, and I used to think he was 
always at his best in a cabmen's shelter. Without a cer- 
tain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite 
comfortable, never quite himself; and at those places 
you are obliged to drink nothing stronger than coffee 
or tea. I liked to see him occasionally, for a change, 
drinking nothing stronger than coffee or tea. At Ox- 
ford, I believe, his favourite form of intoxication had 
been haschisch; afterwards he gave up this somewhat 
elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for readier 
means of oblivion; but he returned to it, I remember, 
for at least one afternoon, in a company of which I had 
been the gatherer and of which I was the host. I re- 
member him sitting a little anxiously, with his chin on 
his breast, awaiting the magic, half-shy in the midst of 
a bright company of young people whom he had only 
seen across the footlights. The experience was not a 
very successful one; it ended in what should have been 
its first symptom, immoderate laughter. 

Always, perhaps, a little consciously, but at least al- 
ways sincerely, in search of new sensations, my friend 
found what was for him the supreme sensation in a very 
passionate and tender adoration of the most escaping 
of all ideals, the ideal of youth. Cherished, as I imagine, 
first only in the abstract, this search after the immature, 
the ripening graces which time can only spoil in the 
ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some of 

(5) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never 
of their opinion. I only saw twice, and for a few mo- 
ments only, the young girl to whom ^xiost of his verses 
were to be written, and whose presence in his life may 
be held to account for much of that astonishing contrast 
between the broad outlines of his life and work. The 
situation seemed to me of the most exquisite and ap- 
propriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee, I 
believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble 
restaurant in a foreign quarter of London, she listened 
to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her mother's 
eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two 
years married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise 
more than the obvious part of what was being offered to 
her, in this shy and eager devotion? Did it ever mean 
very much to her to have made and to have killed a 
poet? She had, at all events, the gift of evoking, and, 
in its way, of retaining, all that was most delicate, sensi- 
tive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I can only 
compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by 
many feet, but with one small, carefully tended flowerbed, 
luminous with lilies. I used to think, sometimes, of 
Verlaine and his "girl-wife," the one really profound pas- 
sion, certainly, of that passionate career; the charming, 
child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end 
of his life, with an unchanged tenderness and disappoint- 
ment: "Vous n'avez rien compris a ma simplicite," as he 
lamented. In the case of Dowson, however, there was a 
sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna; and I think, 
had things gone happily, to a conventionally happy end- 
ing, he would have felt (dare I say?) that his ideal had 
been spoilt. 

But, for the good fortune of poets, things rarely do 
go happily with them, or to conventionally happy end- 
ings. He used to dine every night at the little restau- 

(6) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

rant, and I can always see the picture, which I have so 
often seen through the window in passing: the narrow 
room with the rough tables, for the most part empty, 
except in the innermost corner, where Dowson would 
sit with that singularly sweet and singularly pathetic 
smile on his lips (a smile which seemed afraid of its right 
to be there, as if always dreading a rebuff), playing his 
invariable after-dinner game of cards. Friends would 
come in during the hour before closing time; and the 
girl, her game of cards finished, would quietly disap- 
pear, leaving him with hardly more than the desire to 
kill another night as swiftly as possible. 

Meanwhile she and the mother knew that the fragile 
young man who dined there so quietly every day was 
apt to be quite another sort of person after he had been 
three hours outside. It was only when his life seemed to 
have been irretrievably ruined that Dowson quite de- 
liberately abandoned himself to that craving for drink, 
which was doubtless lying in wait for him in his blood, 
as consumption was also; it was only latterly, when he 
had no longer any interest in life, that he really wished to 
die. But I have never known him when he could resist 
either the desire or the consequences of drink. Sober, 
he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly 
of men; unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; 
a delightful companion, charm itself. Under the influ- 
ence of drink, he became almost literally insane, certainly 
quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning 
passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times 
sprang up like a whirlwind ; he seemed always about to 
commit some act of absurd violence. Along with that 
forgetfulness came other memories. As long as he was 
conscious of himself, there was but one woman for him 
in the world, and for her he had an infinite tenderness 
and an infinite respect. When that face faded from 

(7) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more dif- 
ference than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that 
curious love of the sordid, so comlnon an affectation of 
the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon 
him, and dragged him into more and more sorry cor- 
ners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. 
.His father, when he died, left him in possession of an 
old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering 
house, in that squalid part of the East End which he 
came to know so well, and to feel so strangely at home 
in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses 
which swarm about the docks ; he drifted about in what- 
ever company came in his way; he let heedlessness de- 
velop into a curious disregard of personal tidiness. In 
Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, 
where I saw so much of him one summer, he discovered 
strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he 
made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows 
with the fishermen who came in to drink after mid- 
night. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time 
of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous 
Flemish life, with a zest for what was most sordidly 
riotous in it. It was his own way of escape from life. 

To Dowson, as to all those who have not been "content 
to ask unlikely gifts in vain," nature, life, destiny, what- 
ever one chooses to call it, that power which is strength 
to the strong, presented itself as a barrier against which 
all one's strength only served to dash one to more hope- 
less ruin. He was not a dreamer; destiny passes by the 
dreamer, sparing him because he clamours for nothing. 
He was a child, clamouring for so many things, all im- 
possible. With a body too weak for ordinary existence, 
he desired all the enchantments of all the senses. With 
a soul too shy to tell its own secret, except in exquisite 
evasions, he desired the boundless confidence of love. He 

(8) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

sang one tune, over and over, and no one listened to 
him. He had only to form the most simple wish, and it 
was denied him. He gave way to ill-luck, not knowing 
that he was giving way to his own weakness, and he tried 
to escape from the con c ciousness of things as they were at 
the best, by voluntarily choosing to accept them at their 
worst. For with him it was always voluntary. He was 
never quite without money; he had a little money of his 
own, and he had for many years a weekly allowance from 
a publisher, in return for translations from the French, 
or, if he chose to do it, original work. He was unhappy, 
and he dared not think. To unhappy men, thought, if it 
can be set at work on abstract questions, is the only sub- 
stitute for happiness; if it has not strength to overleap 
the barrier which shuts one in upon oneself, it is the 
one unwearying torture. Dowson had exquisite sensi- 
bility, he vibrated in harmony with every delicate emo- 
tion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of in- 
tellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the 
crowd, to fancy that he lost sight of himself as he dis- 
appeared from the sight of others. The more he soiled 
himself at that gross contact, the further would he seem 
to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion 
after another vain illusion, in the delicate places of the 
world. Seeing himself moving to the sound of lutes, in 
some courtly disguise, down an alley of Watteau's Ver- 
sailles, while he touched finger-tips with a divine crea- 
ture in rose-leaf silks, what was there left for him, as 
the dream obstinately refused to realise itself, but a blind 
flight into some Teniers kitchen, where boors are mak- 
ing merry, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow? 
There, perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could 
forget life as he dreamed it, with too faint hold upon 
his dreams to make dreams come true. 

For, there is not a dream which may not come true, 

(9) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

if we have the energy which makes, or chooses, our own 
fate. We can always, in this world, get what we want, 
if we will it intensely and persistently enough. Whether 
we shall get it sooner or later is the concern of fate; but 
we shall get it. It may come when we have no longer 
any use for it, when we have gone on willing it out of 
habit, or so as not to confess that we have failed. But 
it will come. So few people succeed greatly because so 
few people can conceive a great end, and work towards 
that end without deviating and without tiring. But we 
all know that the man who works for money day and 
night gets rich; and the man who works day and night 
for no matter what kind of material power, gets the 
power. It is the same with the deeper, more spiritual, 
as it seems vaguer issues, which make for happiness and 
every intangible success. It is only the dreams of those 
light sleepers who dream faintly that do not come true. 
We get out of life, all of us, what we bring to it; that, 
and that only, is what it can teach us. There are men 
whom Dowson's experiences would have made great men, 
or great writers ; for him they did very little. Love and 
regret, with here and there the suggestion of an un- 
comforting pleasure snatched by the way, are all that he 
has to sing of; and he could have sung of them at much 
less "expense of spirit," and, one fancies, without the 
"waste of shame" at all. Think what Villon got directly 
out of his own life, what Verlaine, what Musset, what 
Byron, got directly out of their own lives! It requires a 
strong man to "sin strongly" and profit by it. To Daw- 
son the tragedy of his own life could only have resulted 
in an elegy. "I have flung roses, roses, riotously with 
the throng," he confesses, in his most beautiful poem; 
but it was as one who flings roses in a dream, as he passes 
with shut eyes through an unsubstantial throng. The 
depths into which he plunged were always waters of 

(10) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

oblivion, and he returned forgetting them. He is always 
a very ghostly lover, wandering in a land of perpetual 
twilight, as he holds a whispered colloque sentimental 
with the ghost of an old love: 

"Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glace, 
Deux spectres ont evoque le passe." 

It was, indeed, almost a literal unconsciousness, as of one 
who leads two lives, severed from one another as com- 
pletely as sleep is from waking. Thus we get in his 
work very little of the personal appeal of those to whom 
riotous living, misery, a cross destiny, have been of 
so real a value. And it is important to draw this dis- 
tinction, if only for the benefit of those young men who 
are convinced that the first step towards genius is dis- 
order. Dowson is precisely one of the people who are 
pointed out as confirming this theory. And yet Dowson 
was precisely one of those who owed least to circum- 
stances ; and, in succumbing to them, he did no more than 
succumb to the destructive forces which, shut up within 
him, pulled down the house of life upon his own head. 

A soul "unspotted from the world," in a body which 
one sees visibly soiling under one's eyes; that improba- 
bility is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his 
youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and 
the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged. 
There never was a simpler or more attaching charm, 
because there never was a sweeter or more honest na- 
ture. It was not because he ever said anything particu- 
larly clever or particularly interesting, it was not be- 
cause he gave you ideas, or impressed you by any 
strength or originality, that you liked to be with him; 
but because of a certain engaging quality, which seemed 
unconscious of itself, which was never anxious to be or to 
do anything, which simply existed, as perfume exists in 

(") 



ERNEST DOWSON 

a flower. Drink was like a heavy curtain, blotting out 
everything of a sudden; when the curtain lifted, nothing 
had changed. Living always that double life, he had his 
true and his false aspect, and the true life was the ex- 
pression of that fresh, delicate, and uncontaminated na- 
ture which some of us knew in him, and which remains 
for us, untouched by the other, in every line that he 
wrote. 

Ill 

Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared 
more for his prose than his verse; but he was wrong, and 
it is not by his prose that he will live, exquisite as that 
prose was at its best. He wrote two novels in collabora- 
tion with Mr. Arthur Moore: "A Comedy of Masks," 
in 1893, and "Adrian Rome," in 1899, both done under 
the influence of Mr. Henry James, both interesting be- 
cause they were personal studies, and studies of known 
surroundings, rather than for their actual value as novels. 
A volume of "Stories and Studies in Sentiment," called 
"Dilemmas," in which the influence of Mr. Wedmore 
was felt in addition to the influence of Mr. James, ap- 
peared in 1895. Several other short stories, among his 
best work in prose, have not yet been reprinted from 
the Savoy, Some translations from the French, done as 
hack-work, need not be mentioned here, though they 
were never without some traces of his peculiar quality of 
charm in language. The short stories were indeed rather 
"studies in sentiment" than stories; studies of singular 
delicacy, but with only a faint hold on life, so that per- 
haps the best of them was not unnaturally a study in the 
approaches of death: "The Dying of Francis Donne." 
For the most part they dealt with the same motives as 
the poems, hopeless and reverent love, the ethics of re- 

(12) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

nunciation, the disappointment of those who are too weak 
or too unlucky to take what they desire. They have a 
sad and quiet beauty of their own, the beauty of second 
thoughts and subdued emotions, of choice and scholarly 
English, moving in the more fluid and reticent harmonies 
of prose almost as daintily as if it were moving to the 
measure of verse. Dowson's care over English prose 
was like that of a Frenchman writing his own language 
with the respect which Frenchmen pay to French. Even 
English things had to come to him through France, if 
he was to prize them very highly; and there is a passage 
in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought very char- 
acteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesi- 
mal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some 
well-thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in 
the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He was Latin by all 
his affinities, and that very quality of slightness, of par- 
simony almost in his dealings with life and the substance 
of art, connects him with the artists of Latin races, who 
have always been so fastidious in their rejection of mere 
nature, when it comes too nakedly or too clamorously 
into sight and hearing, and so gratefully content with a 
few choice things faultlessly done. 

And Dowson, in his verse (the "Verses" of 1896, "The 
Pierrot of the Minute," a dramatic phantasy in one act, 
of 1897, the posthumous volume "Decorations"), was the 
same scrupulous artist as in his prose, and more felici- 
tously at home there. He was quite Latin in his feeling 
for youth, and death, and "the old age of roses," and the 
pathos of our little hour in which to live and love; Latin 
in his elegance, reticence, and simple grace in the treat- 
ment of these motives; Latin, finally, in his sense of their 
sufficiency for the whole of one's mental attitude. He 
used the commonplaces of poetry frankly, making them 
his own by his belief in them: the Horatian Cynara or 

(13) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

Neobule was still the natural symbol for him when he 
wished to be most personal. I remember his saying to 
me that his ideal of a line of verse was the line of Poe; 

"The viol, the violet, and the vine" ; 

and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which 
clings about such words and such images as these, was 
always to him the true poetical beauty. There never 
was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for the 
song's sake; his theories were all aesthetic, almost tech- 
nical ones, such as a theory, indicated by his preference 
for the line of Poe, that the letter "v" was the most 
beautiful of the letters, and could never be brought into 
verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had 
neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did 
not exist for him; it existed solely as the loveliest of the 
arts. He loved the elegance of Horace, all that was most 
complex in the simplicity of Poe, most birdlike in the 
human melodies of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift, 
unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind 
or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and then 
whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, 
never told, some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress; 
finding words, at times, as perfect as the words of a 
poem headed, "O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua 
homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis." 

There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it has 
ever spoken. The words seem to tremble back into the ■ 
silence which their whisper has interrupted, but not 
before they have created for us a mood, such a mood as 
the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting. 
Languid, half inarticulate, coming from the heart of a 
drowsy sorrow very conscious of itself, and not less sor- 
rowful because it sees its own face looking mournfully 

(14) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

back out of the water, the song seems to have been made 
by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the 
sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless 
strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise in which 
pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is 
the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in 
Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more poignant 
mood, with fine subtlety. 

Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship 
with madness, observe how beautiful the whole thing 
becomes; how instinctively the imagination of the poet 
turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars and flowers 
and the divine part of f orgetf ulness ! It is a symbol of 
the two sides of his own life: the side open to the street, 
and the side turned away from it, where he could "hush 
and bless himself with silence." No one ever worshipped 
beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him here trans- 
figuring a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall see, 
everywhere in his work, that he never admitted an emo- 
tion which he could not so transfigure. He knew his lim- 
its only too well; he knew that the deeper and graver 
things of life were for the most part outside the circle of 
his magic; he passed them by, leaving much of himself 
unexpressed, because he would permit himself to express 
nothing imperfectly, or according to anything but his 
own conception of the dignity of poetry. In the lyric 
in which he has epitomised himself and his whole life, a 
lyric which is certainly one of the greatest lyrical poems 
of our time, "Nom sum qualis eram bonse sub regno 
Cynarae," he has for once said everything, and he has said 
it to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music. 

Here, perpetuated by some unique energy of a tem- 
perament rarely so much the master of itself, is the 
song of passion and the passions, at their eternal war 
in the soul which they quicken or deaden, and in the 

(is) 



ERNEST DOWSON 

body which they break down between them. In the sec- 
ond book, the book of "Decorations/' there are a few 
pieces which repeat, only more faintly, this very personal 
note. Dowson could never have developed; he had al- 
ready said, in his first book of verse, all that he had to 
say. Had he lived, had he gone on writing, he could 
only have echoed himself; and probably it would have 
been the less essential part of himself; his obligation to 
Swinburne, always evident, increasing as his own in- 
spiration failed him. He was always without ambition, 
writing to please his own fastidious taste, with a kind 
of proud humility in his attitude towards the public, not 
expecting or requiring recognition. He died obscure, 
having ceased to care even for the delightful labour of 
writing. He died young, worn out by what was never 
really life to him, leaving a little verse which has the 
pathos of things too young and too frail ever to grow 
old. 

ARTHUR SYMONS. 

1900. 



Yi6> 



THE POEMS OF 
ERNEST DOWSON 



TO 

MISSIE 
(a.f.) 



IN PREFACE: FOR ADELAIDE 

To you, who are my verses, as on some very future 
day, if you ever care to read them, you will understand, 
would it not be somewhat trivial to dedicate any one 
verse, as I may do, in all humility, to my friends? Triv- 
ial, too, perhaps, only to name you even here? Trivial, 
presumptuous? For I need not write your name for 
you at least to know that this and all my work is made 
for you in the first place, and I need not to be reminded 
by my critics that I have no silver tongue such as were 
fit to praise you. So for once you shall go indedicate, if 
not quite anonymous; and I. will only commend my 
little book to you in sentences far beyond my poor com- 
pass which will help you perhaps to be kind to it: 

"Votre personne, vos moindres mouvements me sem~ 
blaient avoir dans le monde une importance extrahu- 
maine. Mon cceur comme de la poussiere se soulevait 
derrihre vos pas. Vous me faisiez I'effet d'un clair-de- 
lune par une nuit d'ete, quand tout est parfums, ombres 
douces, blancheurs, infini; et les delices de la chair et de 
fame etaient contenues pour moi dans votre nom que je 
me repetais en tachant de le baiser sur mes levres. 

u Quelquefois vos paroles me reviennent comme un echo 
lointain, comme le son d'une cloche apporte par le vent; 
et il me semble que vous etes la quand je Us des passages 
de V amour dans les livres. . . . Tout ce qu'on y blame 
d'exagiri, vous me Vavez fait ressentir" 

PONT-AVEN, FlNISTERE, 1 896. 

(19) 



VERSES 



Vitae summa brevis spent nos vetat incohare longam 

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, 

Love and desire and hate: 
I think they have no portion in us after 

We pass the gate. 

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: 

Out of a misty dream 
Our path emerges for a while, then closes 

Within a dream. 



A CORONAL 

With His Songs and Her Days to His Lady and to Love 

Violets and leaves of vine, 

Into a frail, fair wreath 
We gather and entwine: 

A wreath for Love to wear, 

Fragrant as his own breath, 
To crown his brow divine, 

All day till night is near. 
Violets and leaves of vine 
We gather and entwine. 

Violets and leaves of vine 

For Love that lives a day, 
We gather and entwine. 

All day till Love is dead, 

Till eve falls, cold and gray, 
These blossoms, yours and mine, 

Love wears upon his head, 
Violets and leaves of vine 
We gather and entwine. 

Violets and leaves of vine, 

For Love when poor Love dies 
We gather and entwine. 

This wreath that lives a day 

Over his pale, cold eyes, 
Kissed shut by Proserpine, 

At set of sun we lay: 
Violets and leaves of vine 
We gather and entwine. 



(23) 



NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION 

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls, 

These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray: 

And it is one with them when evening falls, 
And one with them the cold return of day. 

These heed not time; their nights and days they make 

Into a long, returning rosary, 
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake; 

Meekness and vigilance and chastity. 

A vowed patrol, in silent companies, 

Life-long they keep before the living Christ. 

In the dim church, their prayers and penances 
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed. 

Outside, the world is wild and passionate; 

Man's weary laughter and his sick despair 
Entreat at their impenetrable gate: 

They heed no voices in their dream of prayer. 

They saw the glory of the world displayed; 

They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet; 
They knew the roses of the world should fade, 

And be trod under by the hurrying feet. 

Therefore they rather put away desire, 

And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary 

And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire: 
Because their comeliness was vanity. 

And there they rest; they have serene insight 

Of the illuminating dawn to be: 
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night, 

The proper darkness of humanity. 
(24) 



NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION 

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild: 
Surely their choice of vigil is the best? 

Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild; 
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest. 



fas) 



VILLANELLE OF SUNSET 

Come hither, Child! and rest: 
This is the end of day, 
Behold the weary West! 

Sleep rounds with equal zest 
Man's toil and children's play: 
Come hither, Child! and rest. 

My white bird, seek thy nest, 
Thy drooping head down lay: 
Behold the weary West! 

Now are the flowers confest 
Of slumber: sleep, as they! 
Come hither, Child! and rest. 

Now eve is manifest, 
And homeward lies our way: 
Behold the weary West! 

Tired flower! upon my breast, 
I would wear thee alway: 

Come hither, Child! and rest; 

Behold, the weary West! 



(26) 



MY LADY APRIL 

Dew on her robe and on her tangled hair; 
Twin dewdrops for her eyes; behold her pass, 
With dainty step brushing the young, green grass, 

The while she trills some high, fantastic air, 

Full of all feathered sweetness: she is fair, 
And all her flower-like beauty, as a glass, 
Mirrors out hope and love: and still, alas! 

Traces of tears her languid lashes wear. 

Say, doth she weep for very wantonness? 
Or is it that she dimly doth foresee 

Across her youth the joys grow less and less, 
The burden of the days that are to be: 
Autumn and withered leaves and vanity, 

And winter bringing end in barrenness. 



(27) 



TO ONE IN BEDLAM 

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars, 
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine; 
Those scentless wisps of straw, that miserably line 
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares, 

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars 
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine 
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchaunted wine, 
And make his melancholy germane to the stars? 

O lamentable brother! if those pity thee, 

Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me; 

Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap, 

All their days, vanity? Better than mortal flowers, 

Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep, 

The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours! 



(28) 



AD DOMNULAM SUAM 

Little lady of my heart! 

Just a little longer, 
Love me: we will pass and part, 

Ere this love grow stronger. 

I have loved thee, Child! too well, 
To do aught but leave thee: 

Nay! my lips should never tell 
Any tale, to grieve thee. 

Little lady of my heart! 

Just a little longer, 
I may love thee: we will part, 

Ere my love grow stronger. 

Soon thou leavest fairy-land; 

Darker grow thy tresses: 
Soon no more of hand in hand; 

Soon no more caresses! 

Little lady of my heart! 

Just a little longer, 
Be a child: then, we will part, 

Ere this love grow stronger. 



(29) 



AMOR UMBRATILIS 

A gift of Silence, sweet! 

Who may not ever hear: 
To lay down at your unobservant feet, 

Is all the gift I bear. 

I have no songs to sing, 

That you should heed or know: 

I have no lilies, in full hands, to fling 
Across the path you go. 

I cast my flowers away, 

Blossoms unmeet for you! 
The garland I have gathered in my day: 

My rosemary and rue. 

I watch you pass and pass, 

Serene and cold: I lay 
My lips upon your trodden, daisied grass, 

And turn my life away. 

Yea, for I cast you, sweet! 

This one gift, you shall take: 
Like ointment, on your unobservant feet, 

My silence, for your sake. 



(30) 



AMOR PROFANUS 

Beyond the pale of memory, 

In some mysterious dusky grove; 

A place of shadows utterly, 

Where never coos the turtle-dove, 

A world forgotten of the sun: 

I dreamed we met when day was done, 

And marvelled at our ancient love. 

Met there by chance, long kept apart, 

We wandered through the darkling glades; 

And that old language of the heart 

We sought to speak: alas! poor shades! 

Over our pallid lips had run 

The waters of oblivion, 

Which crown all loves of men or maids. 

In vain we stammered: from afar 
Our old desire shone cold and dead: 
That time was distant as a star, 
When eyes were bright and lips were red. 
And still we went with downcast eye 
And no delight in being nigh, 
Poor shadows most uncomforted. 

Ah, Lalage! while life is ours, 
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white, 
But pluck the pretty, fleeting flowers 
That deck our little path of light: 
For all too soon we twain shall tread 
The bitter pastures of the dead: 
Estranged, sad spectres of the night. 



(3i) 



VILLANELLE OF MARGUERITES 

"A little, passionately, not at all?" 
She casts the snowy petals on the air: 
And what care we how many petals fall! 

Nay, wherefore seek the seasons to forestall? 
It is but playing, and she will not care, 
A little, passionately, not at all! 

She would not answer us if we should call 
Across the years: her visions are too fair; 
And what care we how many petals fall! 

She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall 
With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair, 
A little, passionately, not at all! 

Knee-deep she goes in meadow grasses tall, 
Kissed by the daisies that her fingers tear: 
And what care we how many petals fall! 

We pass and go: but she shall not recall 
What men we were, nor all she made us bear: 
"A little, passionately, not at all!" 
And what care we how many petals fall! 



(32) 






YVONNE OF BRITTANY 

In your mother's apple-orchard, 

Just a year ago, last spring: 
Do you remember, Yvonne! 

The dear trees lavishing 
Rain of their starry blossoms 

To make you a coronet? 
Do you ever remember, Yvonne? 

As I remember yet. 

In your mother's apple-orchard, 

When the world was left behind: 
You were shy, so shy, Yvonne! 

But your eyes were calm and kind. 
We spoke of the apple harvest, 

When the cider press is set, 
And such-like trifles, Yvonne! 

That doubtless you forget. 

In the still, soft Breton twilight, 

We were silent; words were few, 
Till your mother came out chiding, 

For the grass was bright with dew: 
But I know your heart was beating, 

Like a fluttered, frightened dove. 
Do you ever remember, Yvonne? 

That first faint flush of love? 

In the fulness of midsummer, 

When the apple-bloom was shed, 
Oh, brave was your surrender, 

Though shy the words you said. 
I was glad, so glad, Yvonne! 

To have led you home at last; 
Do you ever remember, Yvonne! 

How swiftly the days passed? 
(33) 



YVONNE OF BRITTANY 

In your mother's apple-orchard 

It is grown too dark to stray, 
There is none to chide you, Yvonne! 

You are over far away. 
There is dew on your grave grass, Yvonne! 

But your feet it shall not wet: 
No, you never remember, Yvonne! 

And I shall soon forget. 



(34) 



BENEDICTIO DOMINI 

Without, the sullen noises of the street! 

The voice of London, inarticulate, 
Hoarse and blaspheming, surges in to meet 

The silent blessing of the Immaculate. 

Dark is the church, and dim the worshippers, 

Hushed with bowed heads as though by some old spell, 

While through the incense-laden air there stirs 
The admonition of a silver bell. 

Dark is the church, save where the altar stands, 
Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light, 

Where one old priest exalts with tremulous hands 
The one true solace of man's fallen plight. 

Strange silence here: without, the sounding street 
Heralds the world's swift passage to the fire: 

O Benediction, perfect and complete! 

W r hen shall men cease to suffer and desire? 



(35) 



GROWTH 

I watched the glory of her childhood change, 
Half-sorrowful to find the child I knew, 

(Loved long ago in lily-time) 
Become a maid, mysterious and strange, 
With fair, pure eyes — dear eyes, but not the eyes I knew 
Of old, in the olden time! 

Till on my doubting soul the ancient good 
Of her dear childhood in the new disguise 

Dawned, and I hastened to adore 
The glory of her waking maidenhood, 
And found the old tenderness within her deepening eyes, 
But kinder than before. 



(36) 



AD MANUS PUELLAE 

I was always a lover of ladies' hands! 

Or ever mine heart came here to tryst, 
For the sake of your carved white hands' commands; 

The tapering fingers, the dainty wrist; 

The hands of a girl were what I kissed. 

I remember an hand like a fleur-de-lys 

When it slid from its silken sheath, her glove; 

With its odours passing ambergris: 

And that was the empty husk of a love. 
Oh, how shall I kiss your hands enough? 

They are pale with the pallor of ivories ; 

But they blush to the tips like a curled sea-shell: 

What treasure, in kingly treasuries, 
Of gold, and spice for the thurible, 
Is sweet as her hands to hoard and tell? 

I know not the way from your finger-tips, 
Nor how I shall gain the higher lands, 

The citadel of your sacred lips: 

I am captive still of my pleasant bands, 
The hands of a girl, and most your hands. 



(37) 



FLOS LUNAE 

I would not alter thy cold eyes, 
Nor trouble the calm fount of speech 
With aught of passion or surprise. 
The heart of thee I cannot reach: 
I would not alter thy cold eyes! 

I would not alter thy cold eyes; 



''% 



Nor have thee smile, nor make thee weep: 
Though all my life droops down and dies, 
Desiring thee, desiring sleep, 
I would not alter thy cold eyes. 

I would not alter thy cold eyes; 
I would not change thee if I might, 
To whom my prayers for incense rise, 
Daughter of dreams! my moon of night! 
I would not alter thy cold eyes. 

I would not alter thy cold eyes, 
With trouble of the human heart: 
Within their glance my spirit lies, 
A frozen thing, alone, apart; 
I would not alter thy cold eyes. 



(38) 



NON SUM QUALIS ERAM BONAE SUB REGNO 
CYNARAE 

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine 
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed 
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; 
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: 
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, 
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; 
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: 
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: 
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, 
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; 
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desir: : 
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 



(39) 



VANITAS 

Beyond the need of weeping, 
Beyond the reach of hands, 

May she be quietly sleeping, 
In what dim nebulous lands? 

Ah, she who understands! 

The long, long winter weather, 
These many years and days, 

Since she, and Death, together, 
Left me the wearier ways: 

And now, these tardy bays! 

The crown and victor's token: 
How are they worth to-day? 

The one word left unspoken, 
It were late now to say: 

But cast the palm away! 

For once, ah once, to meet her, 
Drop laurel from tired hands: 

Her cypress were the sweeter, 
In her oblivious lands: 

Haply she understands! 

Yet, crossed that weary river, 

In some ulterior land, 
Or anywhere, or ever, 

Will she stretch out a hand? 
And will she understand? 



(40) 



EXILE 

« 

By the sad waters of separation 

Where we have wandered by divers ways, 
I have but the shadow and imitation 

Of the old memorial days. 

In music I have no consolation, 
No roses are pale enough for me; 

The sound of the waters of separation 
Surpasseth roses and melody. 

By the sad waters of separation 
Dimly I hear from an hidden place 

The sigh of mine ancient adoration: 
Hardly can I remember your face. 

If you be dead, no proclamation 

Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea: 

Living, the waters of separation 
Sever for ever your soul from me. 

No man knoweth our desolation; 

Memory pales of the old delight; 
While the sad waters of separation 

Bear us on to the ultimate night. 



(41) 



SPLEEN 

I was not sorrowful, I could not weep, 
And all my memories were put to sleep. 

I watched the river grow more white and strange, 
All day till evening I watched it change. 

All day till evening I watched the rain 
Beat wearily upon the window pane. 

I was not sorrowful, but only tired 
Of everything that ever I desired. 

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me 
The shadow of a shadow utterly. 

All day mine hunger for her heart became 
Oblivion, until the evening came, 

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep, 
With all my memories that could not sleep. 



(42) 



O MORS! QUAM AMARA EST MEMORIA TUA 

HOMINI PACEM HABENTI IN SUBSTANTIA 

SUIS 

Exceeding sorrow 

Consumeth my sad heart t 

Because to-morrow 
We must depart, 

Now is exceeding sorrow 
All my part! 

Give over playing, 

Cast thy viol away: 
Merely laying 

Thine head my way: 
Prithee, give over playing, 

Grave or gay. 

Be no word spoken; 

Weep nothing: let a pale 
Silence, unbroken 

Silence prevail! 
Prithee, be no word spoken, 

Lest I fail! 

Forget to-morrow! 

Weep nothing: only lay 
In silent sorrow 

Thine head my way: 
Let us forget to-morrow, 

This one day! 



(43) 



Ah, dans ces mornes se jours 
Les jamais sont les toujours 

Paul Verlaine 

You would have understood me, had you waited; 

I could have loved you, dear! as well as he: 
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated 
Always to disagree. 

What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter: 
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid. 
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter, 
Shall I reproach you dead? 



cover 



Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise 

All the old anger, setting us apart: 
Always, in all, in truth was I your lover; 
Always, I held your heart. 

I have met other women who were tender, 

As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare. 
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender, 
I who had found you fair? 

Had we been patient, dear! ah, had you waited, 

I had fought death for you, better than he: 
But from the very first, dear! we were fated 
Always to disagree. 

Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses 
Love that in life was not to be our part: 
On your low lying mound between the roses, 
Sadly I cast my heart. 

I would not waken you: nay! this is fitter; 
Death and the darkness give you unto me; 
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter, 
Hardly can disagree. 

(44) 



APRIL LOVE 

We have walked in Love's land a little way, 

We have learnt his lesson a little while, 
And shall we not part at the end of day, 
With a sigh, a smile? 

A little while in the shine of the sun, 

We were twined together, joined lips, forgot 
How the shadows fall when the day is done, 
And when Love is not. 

We have made no vows — there will none be broke, 

Our love was free as the wind on the hill, 
There was no word said we need wish unspoke, 
We have wrought no ill. 

So shall we not part at the end of day, 

Who have loved and lingered a little while, 
Join lips for the last time, go our way, 
With a sigh, a smile? 






(45) 



VAIN HOPE 

Sometimes, to solace my sad heart, I say, 
Though late it be, though lily-time be past, 
Though all the summer skies be overcast, 

Haply I will go down to her, some day, 
And cast my rests of life before her feet, 

That she may have her will of me, being so sweet 
And none gainsay! 

So might she look on me with pitying eyes, 
And lay calm hands of healing on my head: 
"Because of thy long pains be comforted; 

For I, even I, am Love: sad soul, arise!" 
So, for her graciousness, I might at last 

Gaze on the very face of Love, and hold Him fast 
In no disguise. 

Haply, I said, she will take pity on me, 
Though late I come, long after lily-time, 
With burden of waste days and drifted rhyme: 

Her kind, calm eyes, down drooping maidenly, 

Shall change, grow soft: there yet is time, meseems, 

I said, for solace; though I know these things are dreams 
And may not be! 



(46) 



VAIN RESOLVES 

I said: "There is an end of my desire: 
Now have I sown, and I have harvested, 

And these are ashes of an ancient fire, 
Which, verily, shall not be quickened. 

Now will I take me to a place of peace, 
Forget mine heart's desire; 

In solitude and prayer, work out my soul's release. 

"I shall forget her eyes, how cold they were; 

Forget her voice, how soft it was and low, 
With all my singing that she did not hear, 

And all my service that she did not know. 
I shall not hold the merest memory 

Of any days that were, 
Within those solitudes where I will fasten me." 

And once she passed, and once she raised her eyes, 
And smiled for courtesy, and nothing said: 

And suddenly the old flame did uprise, 
And all my dead desire was quickened. 

Yea! as it hath been, it shall ever be, 
Most passionless, pure eyes! 

Which never shall grow soft, nor change, nor pity me. 



(47) 



A REQUIEM 

Neobule, being tired, 
Far too tired to laugh or weep, 
From the hours, rosy and gray, 
Hid her golden face away. 
Neobule, fain of sleep, 
Slept at last as she desired! 

Neobule! is it well, 
That you haunt the hollow lands, 
Where the poor, dead people stray, 
Ghostly, pitiful and gray, 
Plucking, with their spectral hands, 
Scentless blooms of asphodel? 

Neobule, tired to death 
Of the flowers that I threw 
On her flower-like, fair feet, 
Sighed for blossoms not so sweet, 
Lunar roses pale and blue, 
Lilies of the world beneath. 

Neobule! ah, too tired 

Of the dreams and days above! 

Where the poor, dead people stray, 

Ghostly, pitiful and gray, 

Out of life and out of love, 

Sleeps the sleep which she desired. 



(48) 



BEATA SOLITUDO 

What land of Silence, 
Where pale stars shine 

On apple-blossom 

And dew-drenched vine, 
Is yours and mine? 

The silent valley 

That we will find, 
Where all the voices 

Of humankind 

Are left behind. 

There all forgetting, 

Forgotten quite, 
We will repose us, 

With our delight 

Hid out of sight. 

The world forsaken, 

And out of mind 
Honour and labour, 

We shall not find 

The stars unkind. 

And men shall travail, 
And laugh and weep; 

But we have vistas 
Of Gods asleep, 
With dreams as deep. 

A land of Silence, 

Where pale stars shine 

On apple-blossoms 

And dew-drenched vine, 
Be yours and mine! 
(49) 



TERRE PROMISE 

Even now the fragrant darkness of her hair 
Had brushed my cheek; and once, in passing by, 
Her hand upon my hand lay tranquilly: 
What things unspoken trembled in the air! 

Always I know, how little severs me 
From mine heart's country, that is yet so far; 
And must I lean and long across a bar, 
That half a word would shatter utterly? 

Ah might it be, that just by touch of hand, 
Or speaking silence, shall the barrier fall; 
And she shall pass, with no vain words at all, 
But droop into mine arms, and understand! 



(SO) 



AUTUMNAL 

Pale amber sunlight falls across 
The reddening October trees, 
That hardly sway before a breeze 

As soft as summer: summer's loss 
Seems little, dear! on days like these. 

Let misty autumn be our part! 
The twilight of the year is sweet: 
Where shadow and the darkness meet 

Our love, a twilight of the heart 
Eludes a little time's deceit. 

Are we not better and at home 
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem 
No harvest joy is worth a dream? 

A little while and night shall come, 
A little while, then, let us dream. 

Beyond the pearled horizons lie 
Winter and night: awaiting these 
We garner this poor hour of ease, 

Until love turn from us and die 
Beneath the drear November trees. 



(Si) - 



IN TEMPORE SENECTUTIS 

When I am old, 

And sadly steal apart, 
Into the dark and cold, 

Friend of my heart! 
Remember, if you can, 
Not him who lingers, but that other man, 
Who loved and sang, and had a beating heart,— * 
When I am old! 

When I am old, 

And all Love's ancient fire 
Be tremulous and cold: 

My soul's desire! 
Remember, if you may, 
Nothing of you and me but yesterday, 
When heart on heart we bid the years conspire 
To make us old. 

When I am old, 

And every star above 
Be pitiless and cold: 

My life's one love! 
Forbid me not to go: 
Remember nought of us but long ago, 
And not at last, how love and pity strove 
When I grew old! 



(52) 



VILLANELLE OF HIS LADY'S TREASURES 

I took her dainty eyes, as well 
As silken tendrils of her hair: 
And so I made a Villanelle! 

I took her voice, a silver bell, 

As clear as song, as soft as prayer; 
I took her dainty eyes as well. 

It may be, said I, who can tell, 

These things shall be my less despair!* 
And so I made a Villanelle! 

I took her whiteness virginal 

And from her cheek two roses rare: 
I took her dainty eyes as well. 

I said: "It may be possible 

Her image from my heart to tear!" 
And so I made a Villanelle. 

I stole her laugh, most musical: 

I wrought it in with artful care; 
I took her dainty eyes as well; 
And so I made a Villanelle. 



(53) 



GRAY NIGHTS 

A while we wandered (thus it is I dream!) 

Through a long, sandy track of No Man's Land, 

Where only poppies grew among the sand, 

The which we, plucking, cast with scant esteem, 

And ever sadlier, into the sad stream, 

Which followed us, as we went, hand in hand, 

Under the estranged stars, a road unplanned, 

Seeing all things in the shadow of a dream. 

And ever sadlier, as the stars expired, 
We found the poppies rarer, till thine eyes 
Grown all my light, to light we were too tired, 
And at their darkening, that no surmise 
Might haunt me of the lost days we desired, 
After them all I flung those memories! 



(54) 



VESPERAL 

Strange grows the river on the sunless evenings! 
The river comforts me, grown spectral, vague and 

dumb: 
Long was the day; at last the consoling shadows 

come: 
Sufficient for the day are the day's evil things! 

Labour and longing and despair the long day brings; 
Patient till evening men watch the sun go west; 
Deferred, expected night at last brings sleep and 

rest: 
Sufficient for the day are the day's evil things! 

At last the tranquil Angelus of evening rings 
Night's curtain down for comfort and oblivion 
Of all the vanities observed by the sun: 
Sufficient for the day are the day's evil things! 

So, some time, when the last of all our evenings 
Crowneth memorially the last of all our days, 
Not loth to take his poppies man goes down and 

says, 
"Sufficient for the day were the day's evil things!" 



(55) 



THE GARDEN OF SHADOW 

Love heeds no more the sighing of the wind 
Against the perfect flowers: thy garden's close 
Is grown a wilderness, where none shall find 
One strayed, last petal of one last year's rose. 

O bright, bright hair! O mouth like a ripe fruit! 
Can famine be so nigh to harvesting? 
Love, that was songful, with a broken lute 
In grass of graveyards goeth mumuring. 

Let the wind blow against the perfect flowers, 
And all thy garden change and glow with spring: 
Love is grown blind with no more count of hours 
Nor part in seed-time nor in harvesting. 



(56) 



SOLI CANTARE PERITI ARCADES 

Oh, I would live in a dairy, 

And its Colin I would be, 
And many a rustic fairy 

Should churn the milk with me. 

Or the fields should be my pleasure, 
And my flocks should follow me, 

Piping a frolic measure 
For Joan or Marjorie. 

For the town is black and weary, 
And I hate the London street; 

But the country ways are cheery, 
And country lanes are sweet. 

Good luck to you, Paris ladies! 

Ye are over fine and nice 
I know where the country maid is, 

Who needs not asking twice. 

Ye are brave in your silks and satins, 
As ye mince about the Town; 

But her feet go free in pattens, 
If she wear a russet gown. 

If she be not queen nor goddess 

She shall milk my brown-eyed herds, 

And the breasts beneath her bodice 
Are whiter than her curds. 

So I will live in a dairy, 

And its Colin I will be, 
And its Joan that I will marry, 

Or, haply, Marjorie. 
(57) 



ON THE BIRTH OF A FRIEND'S CHILD 

Mark the day white, on which the Fates have 

smiled: ' 
Eugenio and Egeria have a child. 
On whom abundant grace kind Jove imparts 
If she but copy either parent's parts. 
Then, Muses! long devoted to her race, 
Grant her Egeria's virtues and her face; 
Nor stop your bounty there, but add to it 
Eugenio's learning and Eugenio's wit. 



'(SS) 






EXTREME UNCTION 

Upon the eyes, the lips, the feet, 

On all the passages of sense, 
The atoning oil is spread with sweet 

Renewal of lost innocence. 

The feet, that lately ran so fast 

To meet desire, are soothly sealed; 

The eyes, that were so often cast 
On vanity, are touched and healed. 

From troublous sights and sounds set free; 

In such a twilight hour of breath, 
Shall one retrace his life, or see, 

Through shadows, the true face of death? 

Vials of mercy! Sacring oils! 

I know not where nor when I come, 
Nor through what wanderings and toils, 

To crave of you Viaticum. 

Yet, when the walls of flesh grow weak, 
In such an hour, it well may be, 

Through mist and darkness, light will break, 
And each anointed sense will see. 



(S9> 



AMANTIUM IRAE 

When this, our rose, is faded, 

And these, our days, are done, 
In lands profoundly shaded 

From tempest and from sun: 
Ah, once more come together, 

Shall we forgive the past, 
And safe from worldly weather 

Possess our souls at last? 

Or in our place of shadows 

Shall still we stretch an hand 
To green, remembered meadows, 

Of that old pleasant land? 
And vainly there foregathered, 

Shall we regret the sun? 
The rose of love, ungathered? 

The bay, we have not won? 

Ah, child! the world's dark marges 

May lead to Nevermore, 
The stately funeral barges 

Sail for an unknown shore, 
And love we vow to-morrow, 

And pride we serve to-day: 
What if they both should borrow 

Sad hues of yesterday? 

Our pride! Ah, should we miss it, 

Or will it serve at last? 
Our anger, if we kiss it, 

Is like a sorrow past. 
While roses deck the garden, 

While yet the sun is high, 
Doff sorry pride for pardon. 

Or ever love go by. 
(60) 



IMPENITENTIA ULTIMA 

Before my light goes out for ever if God should give 
me a choice of graces, 
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for 
things to be; 
But cry: "One day of the great lost days, one face of all 
the faces, 
Grant me to see and touch once more and nothing 
more to see. 

"For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose 
the world's sad roses, 
And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are 
blind with sweat, 
But at Thy terrible judgment-seat, when this my tired 
life closes, 
I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my 
righteous debt. 

"But once before the sand is run and the silver thread 
is broken, 
Give me a grace and cast aside the veil of dolorous 
years, 
Grant me one hour of all mine hours, and let me see for 
a token 
Her pure and pitiful eyes shine out, and bathe her 
feet with tears." 

Her pitiful hands should calm, and her hair stream 
down and blind me, 
Out of the sight of night, and out of the reach of fear, 
And her eyes should be my light whilst the sun went out 
behind me, 
And the viols in her voice be the last sound in mine 
ear. 

(61) 



IMPENITENTIA ULTIMA 

Before the ruining waters fall and my life be carried 
under, 
And Thine anger cleave me through as a child cuts 
down a flower, 
I will praise Thee, Lord in Hell, while my limbs are 
racked asunder, 
For the last sad sight of her face and the little grace 
of an hour. 



• 62! 



A VALEDICTION 

If we must part, 

Then let it be like this; 
Not heart on heart, 

Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss; 
But touch mine hand and say: 
"Until to-morrow or some other day, 

If we must part! 9 

Words are so weak 

When love hath been so strong: 
Let silence speak: 

"Life is a little while, and love is long; 
A time to sow and reap, 
And after harvest a long time to sleep, 

But words are weak/ 9 



r (6 3 ) 



SAPIENTIA LUNAE 

The wisdom of the world said unto me: 
u Go forth and run, the race is to the brave; 

Perchance some honour tarrieth for theeT 
"As tarrieth," I said, "for sure, the grave." 
For I had pondered on a rune of roses, | 

Which to her votaries the moon discloses. 

The wisdom of the world said: "There are bays: 
Go forth and run, for victory is good, 
After the stress of the laborious days." 
"Yet," said I, "shall I be the worms' sweet food/' 
As I went musing on a rune of roses, 
Which in her hour, the pale, soft moon discloses, 

Then said my voices: "Wherefore strive or run, 
On dusty highways ever, a vain race? 

The long night cometh, starless, void of sun, 

What light shall serve thee like her golden face?" 

For I had pondered on a rune of roses, 

And knew some secrets which the moon discloses. 

"Yea," said I, "for her eyes are pure and sweet 
As lilies, and the fragrance of her hair 

Is many laurels; and it is not meet 

To run for shadows when the prize is here"; 
And I went reading in that rune of roses 
Which to her votaries the moon discloses. 



(64) 



Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus Amore* 

ProperttuS 

Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad, 
Here in the silence, under the wan moon; 
Sweet are thine eyes, but how can I be glad, 
Knowing they change so soon? 



For Love's sake, Dear, be silent! Cover me 

In the deep darkness of thy falling hair: 
Fear is upon me and the memory 
Of what is all men's share. 



O could this moment be perpetuate! 

Must we grow old, and leaden-eyed and gray, 
And taste no more the wild and passionate 
Love sorrows of to-day? 



Grown old, and faded, Sweet! and past desire, 
Let memory die, lest there be too much ruth, 
Remembering the old, extinguished fire 
Of our divine, lost youth. 



O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth! 

My lips' life-fruitage, might I taste and die 
Here in thy garden, where the scented south 
Wind chastens agony; 



Reap death from thy live lips in one long kiss, 

And look my last into thine eyes and rest: 
What sweets had life to me sweeter than this 
Swift dying on thy breast? 

^65) 



Or, if that may not be, for Love's sake, Dear! 

Keep silence still, and dream that we shall lie, 
Red mouth to mouth, entwined, and always hear 
The south wind's melody, 

Here in thy garden, through the sighing boughs, 

Beyond the reach of time and chance and change, 
And bitter life and death, and broken vows, 
Jhat sadden and estrange. 



(66) 



SERAPHITA 

Come not before me now, O visionary face! 

Me tempest-tost, and borne along life's passionate sea; 

Troublous and dark and stormy though my passage be; 

Not here and now may we commingle or embrace, 

Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface 

The bright illumination of thy memory, 

Which dominates the night; rest, far away from me, 

In the serenity of thine abiding place! 

But when the storm is highest, and the thunders blare, 
And sea and sky are riven, O moon of all my night! 
Stoop down but once in pity of my great despair, 
And let thine hand, though over late to help, alight 
But once upon my pale eyes and my drowning hair, 
Before the great waves conquer in the last vain fight. 



(67) 



EPIGRAM 

Because I am idolatrous and have besought, 
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer, 
The admirable image that my dreams have wrought 
Out of her swan's neck and her dark, abundant hair: 
The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their 

own, 
Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone. 



(68) 



QUID NON SPEREMUS, AM ANTES? 

Why is there in the least touch of her hands 
More grace than other women's lips bestow, 

If love is but a slave in fleshly bands 
Of flesh to flesh, wherever love may go? 

Why choose vain grief and heavy-hearted hours 
For her lost voice, and dear remembered hair, 

If love may cull his honey from all flowers, 
And girls grow thick as violets, everywhere? 

Nay! She is gone, and all things fall apart; 

Or she is cold, and vainly have we prayed; 
And broken is the summer's splendid heart, 

And hope within a deep, dark grave is laid. 

As man aspires and falls, yet a soul springs 

Out of his agony of flesh at last, 
So love that flesh enthralls, shall rise on wings 

Soul-centred, when the rule of flesh is past. 

Then, most High Love, or wreathed with myrtle 
sprays, 

Or crownless and forlorn, nor less a star, 
Thee may I serve and follow, all my days, 

Whose thorns are sweet as never roses are! 



(60) 



CHANSON SANS PAROLES 

In the deep violet air, 
Not a leaf is stirred; 
There is no sound heard, 

But afar, the rare 

Trilled voice of a bird. 

Is the wood's dim heart, 
And the fragrant pine, 
Incense, and a shrine 

Of her coming? Apart, 
I wait for a sign. 

What the sudden hush said, 
She will hear, and forsake, 
Swift, for my sake, 

Her green, grassy bed: 
She will hear and awake! 

She will hearken and glide, 
From her place of deep rest, 
Dove-eyed, with the breast 

Of a dove, to my side: 
The pines bow their crest. 

I wait for a sign: 

The leaves to be waved, 
The tall tree-tops laved 

In a flood of sunshine, 
This world to be saved! 

In the deep violet air, 
Not a leaf is stirred; 
There is no sound heard, 

But afar, the rare 

Trilled voice of a bird. 
(70) 






THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

THE CHARACTERS 

A Moon Maiden 
Pierrot 

THE SCENE 

A glade in the Pare due Petit Trianon. In the centre & 
Doric temple with steps coming down the stage. On 
the left a little Cupid on a pedestal. Twilight 

[Pierrot enters with his hands full of lilies. He is 
burdened with a little basket. He stands gazing 
at the Temple and the Statue.] 
Pierrot 

My journey's end! This surely is the glade 
Which I was promised: I have well obeyed! 
A clue of lilies was I bid to find, 
Where the green alleys most obscurely wind; 
Where tall oaks darkliest canopy overhead, 
And moss and violet make the softest bed; 
Where the path ends, and leagues behind me lie 
The gleaming courts and gardens of Versailles; 
The lilies streamed before me, green and white; 
I gathered, following; they led me right, 
To the bright temple and the sacred grove: 
This is, in truth, the very shrine of Love! 

[He gathers together his flowers and lays them at 
the foot of Cupid 9 s statue; then he goes timidly 
up the first steps of the temple and stops.] 

(71) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Pierrot 

It is so solitary, I grow afraid. 
Is there no priest here, no devoted maid? 
Is there no oracle, no voice to speak, 
Interpreting to me the word I seek? 

[A very gentle music of lutes floats out from the 
temple, Pierrot starts back; he shows ex- 
treme surprise; then he returns to the fore- 
ground, and crouches down in rapt attention 
until the music ceases. His face grovjs 
puzzled and petulant .] 
Pierrot 

Too soon! too soon! in that enchanting strain, 
Days yet unlived, I almost lived again: 
It almost taught me that I most would know — 
Why am I here, and why am I Pierrot? 

[Absently he picks up a lily which has fallen to the 
ground, and repeats:] 
Pierrot 

Why came I here, and why am I Pierrot? 
That music and this silence both affright; 
Pierrot can never be a friend of night. 
I never felt my solitude before — 
Once safe at home, I will return no more. 
Yet the commandment of the scroll was plain; 
While the light lingers let me read again. 

[He takes a scroll from his bosom and reads:] 
Pierrot 

"He loves to-night who never loved before; 
Who ever loved, to-night shall love once more/' 
I never loved! I know not what love is. 
I am so ignorant — but what is this? 

[Reads:] 
"Who would adventure to encounter Love 
Must rest one night within this hallowed grove. 

(72) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Cast down thy lilies, which have led thee on, 

Before the tender feet of Cupidon." 

Thus much is done, the night remains to me. 

Well, Cupidon, be my security! 

Here is more writing, but too faint to read. 

[He puzzles for a moment, then casts the scroll down.] 
Pierrot 

Hence, vain old parchment. I have learnt thy rede! 

[He looks round uneasily, starts at his shadow; 

then discovers his basket with glee. He takes 

out a flask of wine, pours it into a glass, and 

drinks.] 

Pierrot 

Courage, mon Ami! I shall never miss 
Society with such a friend as this. 
How merrily the rosy bubbles pass, 
Across the amber crystal of the glass. 
I had forgotten you. Methinks this quest 
Can wake no sweeter echo in my breast. 

[Looks round at the statue, and starts.] 
Pierrot 

Nay, little god ! forgive. I did but jest. 
[He jills another glass, and pours it upon the statue.] 
Pierrot 

This libation, Cupid, take, 

With the lilies at thy feet; 
Cherish Pierrot for their sake: 

Send him visions strange and sweet, 
While he slumbers at thy feet. 
Only love kiss him awake! 
Only love kiss him awake! 
[Slowly falls the darkness, soft music plays, while 
Pierrot gathers together fern and foliage into a 
(73) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

rough couch at the foot of the steps which lead 
to the Temple d* Amour. Then he lies down 
upon it, having made his prayer. It is night. ,] 
Pierrot 

[Softly.] 
Music, more music, far away and faint: 
It is an echo of mine heart's complaint. 
Why should I be so musical and sad? 
I wonder why I used to be so glad? 
In single glee I chased blue butterflies, 
Half butterfly myself, but not so wise, 
For they were twain, and I was only one. 
Ah me! how pitiful to be alone. 
My brown birds told me much, but in mine ear 
They never whispered this — I learned it here: 
The soft wood sounds, the rustlings in the breeze, 
Are but the stealthy kisses of the trees. 
Each flower and fern in this enchanted wood 
Leans to her fellow, and is understood; 
The eglantine, in loftier station set, 
Stoops down to woo the maidly violet. 
In gracile pairs the very lilies grow: 
None is companionless except Pierrot. 
Music, more music! how its echoes steal 
Upon my senses with unlocked for weal. 
Tired am I, tired, and far from this lone glade 
Seems mine old joy in rout and masquerade. 
Sleep cometh over me, now will I prove, 
By Cupid's grace, what is this thing called love. 
[Sleeps.] 
[There is more music of lutes for an interval, dur- 
ing which a bright radiance, white and cold, 
streams from the temple upon the face of 
Pierrot. Presently a Moon Maiden steps out 
(74) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

of the temple; she descends and stands over 
the sleeper.} 
The Lady 

Who is this mortal 

Who ventures to-night 
To woo an immortal? 

Cold, cold the moon's light 
For sleep at this portal, 
Bold lover of night. 

Fair is the mortal 

In soft, silken white, 
Who seeks an immortal. 

Ah, lover of night, 
Be warned at the portal, 
And save thee in flight! 
[She stoops over him: Pierrot stirs in his sleep.] 
Pierrot 

[Mmmuring.] 
Forget not, Cupid. Teach me all thy lore: 
"He loves to-night who never loved before/ 9 
The Lady 

Unwitting boy! when, be it soon or late, 
What Pierrot ever has escaped his fate? 
What if I warned him! He might yet evade, 
Through the long windings of this verdant glade; 
Seek his companions in the blither way, 
Which, else, must be as lost as yesterday. 
So might he still pass some unheeding hours 
In the sweet company of birds and flowers. 
How fair he is, with red lips formed for joy, 
As softly curved as those of Venus' boy. 
Methinks his eyes, beneath their silver sheaves, 
Rest tranquilly like lilies under leaves. 
Arrayed in innocence, what touch of grace 

(75) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Reveals the scion of a courtly race? 

Well, I will warn him, though, I fear, too late — 

What Pierrot ever has escaped his fate? 

But, see, he stirs, new knowledge fires his brain, 

And Cupid's vision bids him wake again. 

Dione's Daughter! but how fair he is, 

Would it be wrong to rouse him with a kiss? 

[She stoops down and kisses him, then withdraws 
into the shadow.] 
Pierrot 

[Rubbing his eyes.] 

Celestial messenger! remain, remain; 
Or, if a vision, visit me again! 
What is this light, and whither am I come 
To sleep beneath the stars so far from home? 

[Rises slowly to his feet.] 
Pierrot 

Stay, I remember this is Venus' Grove, 

And I am hither come to encounter 

The Lady 

[Coming forward but veiled.] 

Love! 
[In ecstasy, throwing himself at her feet.] 
Pierrot 

Then have I ventured and encountered Love? 
The Lady 

Not yet, rash boy! and, if thou wouldst be wise, 
Return unknowing; he is safe who flies. 
Pierrot 

Never, sweet lady, will I leave this place 
Until I see the wonder of thy face. 
Goddess or Naiad! lady of this Grove, 
Made mortal for a night to teach me love, 
Unveil thyself, although thy beauty be 
Too luminous for my mortality. 

(76) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

The Lady 

[Unveiling.] 

Then, foolish boy, receive at length thy will: 
Now knowest thou the greatness of thine ill. 
Pierrot 

Now have I lost my heart, and gained my goal. 
The Lady 

Didst thou not read the warning on the scroll? 
[Picking up the parchment.] 
Pierrot 

I read it all, as on this quest I fared, 
Save where it was illegible and hard. 
The Lady 

Alack! poor scholar, wast thou never taught 
A little knowledge serveth less than naught? 

Hadst thou perused but, stay, I will explain 

What was the writing which thou didst disdain, 

[Reads:] 
"Au Petit Trianon, at night's full noon, 
Mortal, beware the kisses of the moon! 
Whoso seeks her she gathers like a flower — 
He gives a life, and only gains an hour." 
Pierrot 

[Laughing recklessly.] 

Bear me away to thine enchanted bower, 
All of my life I venture for an hour. 
The Lady 

Take up thy destiny of short delight; 
I am thy lady for a summer's night. 
Lift up your viols, maidens of my train, 
And work such havoc on this mortal's brain 
That for a moment he may touch and know 
Immortal things, and be full Pierrot. 
White music, Nymphs! Violet and Eglantine! 
To stir his tired veins like magic wine. 

(77) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

What visitants across his spirit glance, 
Lying on lilies, while he watch me dance? 
Watch, and forget all weary things of earth, 
All memories and cares, all joy and mirth, 
While my dance woos him, light and rhythmical, 
And weaves his heart into my coronal. 
Music, more music for his soul's delight: 
Love is his lady for a summer's night. 

[Pierrot reclines, and gazes at her while she dances. 
The dance finished, she beckons to him: he 
rises dreamily, and stands at her side.] 
Pierrot 

Whence came, dear Queen, such magic melody? 
The Lady 

Pan made it long ago in Arcady. 
Pierrot 

I heard it long ago, I know not where, 
As I knew thee, or ever I came here. 
But I forget all things — my name and race, 
All that I ever knew except thy face. 
Who art thou, lady? Breathe a name to me, 
That I may tell it like a rosary. 
Thou, whom I sought, dear Dryad of the trees, 
How art thou designate — art thou Heart's-Ease? 
The Lady 

Waste not the night in idle questioning, 
Since Love departs at dawn's awakening. 
Pierrot 

Nay, thou art right ; what recks thy name or state, 
Since thou art lovely and compassionate. 
Play out thy will on me: I am thy lyre. 
The Lady 

I am to each the face of his desire. 
Pierrot 

I am not Pierrot, but Venus' dove, 

(78) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Who craves a refuge on the breast of love. 
The Lady 

What wouldst thou of the maiden of the moon? 
Until the cock crow I may grant thy boon. 
Pierrot 

Then, sweet Moon Maiden, in some magic car, 
Wrought wondrously of many a homeless star — 
Such must attend thy journeys through the skies, — I 
Drawn by a team of milk-white butterflies, 
Whom, with soft voice and music of thy maids, 
Thou urgest gently through the heavenly glades; 
Mount me beside thee, bear me far away 
From the low regions of the solar day; 
Over the rainbow, up into the moon, 
Where is thy palace and thine opal throne; 

There on thy bosom 

The Lady 

Too ambitious boy! 
I did but promise thee one hour of joy. 
This tour thou plannest, with a heart so light, 
Could hardly be completed in a night. 
Hast thou no craving less remote than this? 
Pierrot 

Would it be impudent to beg a kiss? 
The Lady 

I say not that: yet prithee have a care! 
Often audacity has proved a snare. 
How wan and pale do moon-kissed roses grow — 
Dost thou not fear my kisses, Pierrot? 
Pierrot 

As one who faints upon the Libyan plain 
Fears the oasis which brings life again! 
The Lady 

Where far away green palm trees seem to stand 
May be a mirage of the wreathing sand. 

(79) 






THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Pierrot 

Nay, dear enchantress, I consider naught, 
Save mine own ignorance, which would be taught. 
The Lady 

Dost thou persist? 
Pierrot 

I do entreat this boon! 

[She bends forward, their lips meet: she withdraws 
with a petulant shiver. She utters a peal of 
clear laughter.] 
The Lady 

Why art thou pale, fond lover of the moon? 
Pierrot 

Cold are thy lips, more cold than I can tell 
Yet would I hang on them, thine icicle! 
Cold is thy kiss, more cold than I could dream 
Arctus sits, watching the Boreal stream: 
But with its frost such sweetness did conspire 
That all my veins are filled with running fire; 
Never I knew that life contained such bliss 
As the divine completeness of a kiss. 
The Lady 

Apt scholar! so love's lesson has been taught, 
Warning, as usual, has gone for naught. 
Pierrot 

Had all my schooling been of this soft kind, 
To play the truant I were less inclined. 
Teach me again! I am a sorry dunce — 
I never knew a task by conning once. 
The Lady 

Then come with me! below this pleasant shrine 
Of Venus we will presently recline, 
Until birds' twitter beckon me away 
To mine own home, beyond the milky-way. 
I will instruct thee, for I deem as yet 

(80) . . 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Of Love thou knowest but the alphabet. 
Pierrot 

In its sweet grammar I shall grow most wise, 
If all its rules be written in thine eyes. 

[The lady sits upon a step of the temple, and Pierrot 
leans upon his elbow at her feet, regarding her.] 
Pierrot 

Sweet contemplation! how my senses yearn 
To be thy scholar always, always learn. 
Hold not so high from me thy radiant mouth, 
Fragrant with all the spices of the South; 
Nor turn, O sweet! thy golden face away, 
For with it goes the light of all my day. 
Let me peruse it, till I know by rote 
Each line of it, like music, note by note; 
Raise thy long lashes, Lady! smile again: 
These studies profit me. 

[Taking her hand.] 
The Lady 

Refrain, refrain! 
Pierrot 

[With passion.] 
I am but studious, so do not stir ; 
Thou art my star, I thine astronomer! 
Geometry was founded on thy lip. 

[Kisses her hand.] 
The Lady 

This attitude becomes not scholarship! 
Thy zeal I praise; but, prithee, not so fast, 
Nor leave the rudiments until the last. 
Science applied is good, but 'twere a schism 
To study such before the catechism, 
Bear thee more modestly, while I submit 
Some easy problems to confirm thy wit. 

(8r) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Pierrot 

In all humility my mind I pit 
Against her problems which would test my wit. 
The Lady 

[Questioning him from a little book bound de- 
liriously in vellum.] 
What is Love? 
Is it a folly, 
Is it mirth, or melancholy? 

Joys above, 
Are there many, or not any? 
What is love? 
Pierrot 

[Answering in a very humble attitude of scholar- 
ship.] 

If you please, 
A most sweet folly! 
Full of mirth and melancholy; 

Both of these! 
In its sadness worth all gladness, 
If you please! 
The Lady 

Prithee where, 
Goes Love a-hiding? 
Is he long in his abiding 

Anywhere? 
Can you bind him when you find him; 
Prithee, where? 
Pierrot 

With spring days 
Love comes and dallies: 
Upon the mountains, through the valleys 

Lie Love's ways. 
Then he leaves you and deceives you 
In spring days. 

(82) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

The Lady 

Thine answers please me: 'tis thy turn to ask. 
To meet thy questioning be now my task. 
Pierrot 

Since I know thee, dear Immortal, 
Is my heart become a blossom, 
To be worn upon thy bosom. 
When thou turn me from this portal, 
Whither shall I, hapless mortal, 
Seek love out and win again 
Heart of me that thou retain? 
The Lady 

In and out the woods and valleys, 
Circling, soaring like a swallow, 
Love shall flee and thou shalt follow: 
Though he stops awhile and dallies, 
Never shalt thou stay his malice! 
Moon-kissed mortals seek in vain 
To possess their hearts again! 
Pierrot 

Tell me, Lady, shall I never 
Rid me of this grievous burden! 
Follow Love and find his guerdon 
In no maiden whatsoever? 
Wilt thou hold my heart for ever? 
Rather would I thine forget, 
In some earthly Pierrette! 
The Lady 

Thus thy fate, whatever thy will is! 
Moon-struck child, go seek my traces 
Vainly in all mortal faces! 
In and out among the lilies, 
Court each rural Amaryllis: 
Seek the signet of Love's hand 
In each courtly Corisande! 

(83) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Pierrot 

Now, verily, sweet maid, of school I tire: 
These answers are not such as I desire. 
The Lady 

Why art thou sad? 
Pierrot 

I dare not tell. 
The Lady 

[Caressingly.] 

Come, say! 
Pierrot 

Is love all schooling, with no time to play? 
The Lady 

Though all love's lessons be a holiday, 
Yet I will humour thee: what wouldst thou play? 
Pierrot 

What are the games that small moon-maids enjoy, 
Or is their time all spent in staid employ? 
The Lady 

Sedate they are, yet games they much enjoy: 
The)^ skip with stars, the rainbow is their toy. 
Pierrot 

That is too hard! 
The Lady 

For mortal's play. 

Pierrot 

What then? 
The Lady 

Teach me some pastime from the world of men. 
Pierrot 

I have it, maiden. 
The Lady 

Can it soon be taught? 
Pierrot 

A simple game, I learnt it at the Court. 

(84) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

I sit by thee. 
The Lady 

But, prithee, not so near. 
Pierrot 

That is essential, as will soon appear, 
Lay here thine hand, which cold night dews anoint^ 

Washing its white 

The Lady 

Now is this to the point? 
Pierrot 

Prithee, forbear! Such is the game design. 
The Lady 

Here is my hand. 
Pierrot 

I cover it with mine. 
The Lady 

What must I next? 
[They play.] 
Pierrot 

Withdraw. 
The Lady 

It goes too fast. 
[They continue playing, until Pierrot catches her 
hand.] 
Pierrot 

[Laughing.] 
'Tis done. I win my forfeit at the last. 
[He tries to embrace her. She escapes; he chases her 
round the stage; she eludes him.] 
The Lady 

Thou art not quick enough. Who hopes to catch 
A moon-beam, must use twice as much despatch. 
Pierrot 

[Sitting down sulkily.] 
I grow aweary, and my heart is sore, 

(85) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Thou dost not love me; I will play no more. 

[He buries his face in his hands: the lady stands over 
him.] 
The Lady 

What is this petulance? 
Pierrot 

'Tis quick to tell — 
Thou hast but mocked me. 
The Lady 

Nay, I love thee well! 
Pierrot 

Repeat those words, for still within my breast 
A whisper warns me they are said in jest. 
The Lady 

I jested not: at daybreak I must go, 
Yet loving thee far better than thou know. 
Pierrot 

Then, by this altar, and this sacred shrine, 
Take my sworn troth, and swear thee wholly mine! 
The Gods have wedded mortals long ere this. 
The Lady 

There was enough betrothal in my kiss. 
What need of further oaths? 
Pierrot 

That bound not thee! 
The Lady 

Peace! since I tell thee that it may not be. 
But sit beside me whilst I soothe thy bale 
With some moon fancy or celestial tale. 
Pierrot 

Tell me of thee, and that dim, happy place 
Where lies thine home, with maidens of thy race! 
The Lady 

[Seating herself.] 

Calm is it yonder, very calm; the air 
(86) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

For mortal's breath is too refined and rare; 

Hard by a green lagoon our palace rears 

Its dome of agate through a myriad years. 

A hundred chambers its bright walls enthrone, 

Each one carved strangely from a precious stone. 

Within the fairest, clad in purity, 

Our mother dwelleth immemorially: 

Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moon stones on her 

gown 

The floor she treads with little pearls is sown; 
She sits upon a throne of amethysts, 
And orders mortal fortunes as she lists; 
I, and my sisters, all around her stand, 
And, when she speaks, accomplish her demand. 
Pierrot 

Methought grim Clotho and her sisters twain 
With shrivelled fingers spun this web of bane! 
The Lady 

Theirs and my mother's realm is far apart, 
Hers is the lustrous kingdom of the heart, 
And dreamers all, and all who sing and love, 
Her power acknowledge, and her rule approve. 
Pierrot 

Me, even me, she hath led into this grove. 
The Lady 

Yea, thou art one of hers! But, ere this night, 
Often I watched my sisters take their flight 
Down heaven's stairway of the clustered stars 
To gaze on mortals through their lattice bars; 
And some in sleep they woo with dreams of bliss 
Too shadowy to tell, and some they kiss. 
But all to whom they come, my sisters say, 
Forthwith forget all joyance of the day, 
Forget their laughter and forget their tears, 

(87) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

And dream away with singing all their years — 
Moon-lovers always! 
[She sighs.] 
Pierrot 

Why art sad, sweet Moon? 
[Laughing.] 
The Lady 

For this, my story, grant me now a boon. 
Pierrot 

I am thy servitor. 
The Lady 

Would, then, I knew 
More of the earth, what men and women do. 
Pierrot 

I will explain. 
The Lady 

Let brevity attend 
Thy wit, for night approaches to its end. 
Pierrot 

Once was I a page at Court, so trust in me: 
That's the first lesson of society. 
The Lady 
Society? 
Pierrot 

I mean the very best 
Pardy! thou wouldst not hear about the rest. 
I know it not, but am a petit maitre 
At rout and festival and bal champetre 
But since example be instruction's ease, 
Let's play the thing. — Now, Madame, if you 
please! 

[He helps her to rise, and leads her forward: then he 
kisses her hand, bowing over it with a very 
courtly air.] 

(88) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

The Lady 

What am I, then? 
Pierrot 

A most divine Marquise 1 
Perhaps that attitude hath too much ease. 
[Passes her.] 
Ah, that is better! To complete the plan, 
Nothing is necessary save a fan. 
The Lady 

Cool is the night, what needs it? 
Pierrot 

Madame, pray 
Reflect, it is essential to our play. 
The Lady 

[Taking a lily.] 
Here is my fan! 
Pierrot 

So, use it with intent: 
The deadliest arm in beauty's armament!] 
The Lady 

What do we next? 
Pierrot 

We talk! 
The Lady 

But what about? 
Pierrot 

We quiz the company and praise the rout; 
Are polished, petulant, malicious, sly, 
Or what you will, so reputations die. 
Observe the Duchess in Venetian lace, 
With the red eminence. 
The Lady 

A pretty face! 
Pierrot 

For something tarter set thy wits to search — ■ 

(89) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

"She loves the churchman better than the church." 
The Lady 

Her blush is charming; would it were her own! 
Pierrot 

Madame is merciless! 
The Lady 

Is that the tone? 
Pierrot 

The very tone: I swear thou lackest naught. 
Madame was evidently bred at Court. 
The Lady 

Thou speakest glibly: 'tis not of thine age. 
Pierrot 

I listened much, as best becomes a page. 
The Lady 

I like thy Court but little 

Pierrot 

Hush! the Queen! 
Bow, but not low — thou knowest what I mean. 
The Lady 

Nay, that I know not! 
Pierrot 

Though she wear a crown, 
'Tis from La Pompadour one fears a frown. 
The Lady 

Thou art a child: thy malice is a game. 
Pierrot 

A most sweet pastime — scandal is its name. 
The Lady 

Enough, it wearies me. 
Pierrot 

Then, rare Marquise, 
Desert the crowd to wander through the trees. 

[He bows low, and she curtsies; they move round 
(90) 



. THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

the stage. When they pass before the Statue 
he seizes her hand and jails on his knee.] 
The Lady 

What wouldst thou now? 
Pierrot 

Ah, prithee, what, save thee! 
The Lady 

Was this included in thy comedy? 
Pierrot 

Ah, mock me not! In vain with quirk and jest 
I strive to quench the passion in my breast; 
In vain thy blandishments would make me play: 
Still I desire far more than I can say. 
My knowledge halts, ah, sweet, be piteous, 
Instruct me still, while time remains to us, 
Be what thou wist, Goddess, moon-maid, 

Marquise, 

So that I gather from thy lips heart's ease, 
Nay, I implore thee, think thee how time flies! 
The Lady 

Hush! I beseech thee, even now night dies. 
Pierrot 

Night, day, are one to me for thy soft sake. 
[He entreats her with imploring gestures, she hesi- 
tates: then puts her finger on her Up hushing 
him.] 
The Lady 

It is too late, for hark! the birds awake. 
Pierrot 

The birds awake! It is the voice of day! 
The Lady 

Farewell, dear youth! They summon me away. 
[The light changes, it grows daylights and music 
imitates the twitter of the birds. They stand 
gazing at the morning: then Pierrot sinks 
(9i) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

back upon his bed, he covers his face in his 
hands.] 
The Lady 

[Bending over him.] 

Music, my maids! His weary senses steep 
In soft untroubled and oblivious sleep, 
With mandragore anoint his tired eyes, 
That they may open on mere memories, 
Then shall a vision seem his lost delight, 
With love, his lady for a summer's night. 
Dream thou hast dreamt all this, when thou awake, 
Yet still be sorrowful, for a dream's sake. 
I leave thee, sleeper! Yea, I leave thee now, 
Yet take my legacy upon thy brow: 
Remember me, who was compassionate, 
And opened for thee once, the ivory gate. 
I come no more, thou shalt not see my face 
When I am gone to mine exalted place: 
Yet all thy days are mine, dreamer of dreams, 
All silvered over with the moon's pale beams: 
Go forth and seek in each fair face in vain, 
To find the image of thy love again. 
All maids are kind to thee, yet never one 
Shall hold thy truant heart till day be done. 
Whom once the moon has kissed, loves long and late, 
Yet never finds the maid to be his mate. 
Farewell, dear sleeper, follow out thy fate. 

[The Moon Maiden withdraws: a song is sung from 
behind: it is full day.] 

The Moon Maiden's Song. 

Sleep! Cast thy canopy 

Over this sleeper's brain, 
Dim grow his memory, 

When he awake again. 

(92) 



THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE 

Love stays a summer night, 

Till lights of morning come; 

Then takes her winged flight 
Back to her starry home. 

Sleep! Yet thy days are mine; 

Love's seal is over thee: 
Far though my ways from thine, 

Dim though thy memory. 

Love stays a summer night, 

Till lights of morning come; 

Then takes her winged flight 
Back to her starry home. 

[When the song is finished, the curtain jails upon Pier- 
rot sleeping,] 

The End. 



(93) 



DECORATIONS 



BEYOND 

Love's aftermath! I think the time is now 

That we must gather in, alone, apart 

The saddest crop of all the crops that grow, 

Love's aftermath. 
Ah, sweet, — sweet yesterday, the tears that start 
Can not put back the dial; this is, I trow, 
Our harvesting! Thy kisses chill my heart, 
Our lips are cold; averted eyes avow 
The twilight of poor love: we can but part, 
Dumbly and sadly, reaping as we sow, 

Love's aftermath. 



(97) 



DE AMORE 

Shall one be sorrowful because of love, 

Which hath no earthly crown, 

Which lives and dies, unknown? 
Because no words of his shall ever move 

Her maiden heart to own 

Him lord and destined master of her own: 
Is Love so weak a thing as this, 

Who can not lie awake, 

Solely for his own sake, 
For lack of the dear hands to hold, the lips to kiss, 
A mere heart-ache? 



Nay, though love's victories be great and sweet, 

Nor vain and foolish toys, 

His crowned, earthly joys, 
Is there no comfort then in love's defeat? 

Because he shall defer, 

For some short span of years all part in her, 

Submitting to forego 

The certain peace which happier lovers know; 
Because he shall be utterly disowned, 

Nor length of service bring 

Her least awakening: 
Foiled, frustrate and alone, misunderstood, discrowned, 
Is Love less King? 



Grows not the world to him a fairer place, 

How far soever his days 

Pass from his lady's ways, 
From mere encounter with her golden face? 

Though all his sighing be vain, 

Shall he be heavy-hearted and complain? 
Is she not still a star, 

( 9 8) 



DE AMORE 

Deeply to be desired, worshipped afar, 

A beacon-light to aid 

From bitter-sweet delights, Love's masquerade? 
Though he lose many things, 

Though much he miss: 
The heart upon his heart, the hand that clings, 

The memorable first kiss; 
Love that is love at all, 
Needs not an earthly coronal; 
Love is himself his own exceeding great reward, 
A mighty lord! 

Lord over life and all the ways of breath, 

Mighty and strong to save 

From the devouring grave; 
Yea, whose dominion doth out-tyrant death, 

Thou who art life and death in one, 

The night, the sun; 
Who art, when all things seem: 

Foiled, frustrate and forlorn, rejected of to-day 

Go with me all my way, 
And let me not blaspheme. 



(99) 



THE DEAD CHILD 

Sleep on, dear, now 

The last sleep and the best, 
And on thy brow, 

And on thy quiet breast 
Violets I throw. 

Thy scanty years 

Were mine a little while;' 
Life had no fears 

To trouble thy brief smile 
With toil or tears. 

Lie still, and be 

For evermore a child! 
Not grudgingly, 

Whom life has not defiled, 
I render thee. 

Slumber so deep, 

No man would rashly wake;' 
I hardly weep, 

Fain only, for thy sake, 
To share thy sleep. 

Yes, to be dead, 

Dead, here with thee to-day,- 
When all is said 

'Twere good by thee to lay 
My weary head. 

The very best! 

Ah, child so tired of play, 
I stand confessed: 

I want to come thy way, 
And share thy rest, 
(ioo) 



CARTHUSIANS 

Through what long heaviness, assayed in what Strang 3 
fire, 
Have these white monks been brought into the way 
of peace, 
Despising the world's wisdom and the world's desire, 
Which from the body of this death bring no release? 

Within their austere walls no voices penetrate; 

A sacred silence only, as of death, obtains; 
Nothing finds entry here of loud or passionate; 

This quiet is the exceeding profit of their pains. 

From many lands they came, in divers fiery ways; 

Each knew at last the vanity of earthly joys ; 
And one was crowned with thorns, and one was crowned 
with bays, 

And each was tired at last of the world's foolish noise. 

It was not theirs with Dominic to preach God's holy 
wrath, 
They were too stern to bear sweet Francis' gentle 
sway; 
Theirs was a higher calling and a steeper path, 
To dwell alone with Christ, to meditate and pray. 

A cloistered company, they are companionless, 

None knoweth here the secret of his brother's heart: 

They are but come together for more loneliness, 
Whose bond is solitude and silence all their part. 

O beatific life! Who is there shall gainsay, 
Your great refusal's victory, your little loss* 

Deserting vanity for the more perfect way, 
The sweeter service of the most dolorous Cross. 
(ioi) 



CARTHUSIANS 

Ye shall prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail! 

Your silence and austerity shall win at last: 
Desire and mirth, the world's ephemeral lights shall fail, 

The sweet star of your queen is never overcast. 

We fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the wine; 

With wine we dull our souls and careful strains of art; 
Our cups are polished skulls round which the roses twine; 

None dares to look at Death who leers and lurks apart 

Move on, white company, whom that has not sufficed! 

Our viols cease, our wine is death, our roses fail: 
Pray for our heedlessness, O dwellers with the Christ! 

Though the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail. 



r (l02) 



THE THREE WITCHES 

All the moon-shed nights are over, 
And the days of gray and dun; 

There is neither may nor clover, 
And the day and night are one. 

Not an hamlet, not a city 

Meets our strained and tearless eyes; 
In the plain without a pity, 

Where the wan grass droops and dies. 

We shall wander through the meaning 

Of a day and see no light, 
For our lichened arms are leaning 

On the ends of endless night. 

We, the children of Astarte, 
Dear abortions of the moon, 

In a gay and silent party, 
We are riding to you soon. 

Burning ramparts, ever burning! 

To the flame which never dies 
We are yearning, yearning, yearning, 

With our gay and tearless eyes. 

In the plain without a pity, 
(Not an hamlet, not a city) 
Where the wan grass droops and dies. 



(103) 






VILLANELLE OF THE POET'S ROAD 

Wine and woman and song, 

Three things garnish our way: 
Yet is day over long. 

Lest we do our youth wrong, 
Gather them while we may: 
Wine and woman and song. 

Three things render us strong, 

Vine leaves, kisses and bay; 
Yet is day over long. 

Unto us they belong, 

Us the bitter and gay, 
Wine and woman and song. 

We, as we pass along, 

Are sad that they will not stay;] 
Yet is day over long. 

Fruits and flowers among, 
What is better than they: 

Wine and woman and song? 
Yet is day over long. 



(104) 



VILLANELLE OF ACHERON 

By the pale marge of Acheron, 

Me thinks we shall pass restfully, 
Beyond the scope of any sun. 

There all men hie them one by one, 

Far from the stress of earth and sea, 
By the pale marge of Acheron. 

'Tis well when life and love is done, 

'Tis very well at last to be, 
Beyond the scope of any sun. 

No busy voices there shall stun 

Our ears: the stream flows silently 
By the pale marge of Acheron. 

There is the crown of labour won, 

The sleep of immortality, 
Beyond the scope of any sun. 

Life, of thy gifts I will have none, 
My queen is that Persephone, 

By the pale marge of Acheron, 
Beyond the scope of any sua. 



(105) 



SAINT GERMAIN-EN-LAYE 

(1887-1895) 

Through the green boughs I hardly saw thy face, 
They twined so close: the sun was in mine eyes; 
And now the sullen trees in sombre lace 
Stand bare beneath the sinister, sad skies. 

O sun and summer! Say in what far night, 
The gold and green, the glory of thine head, 
Of bough and branch have fallen? Oh, the white 
Gaunt ghosts that flutter where thy feet have sped, 

Across the terrace that is desolate, 
And rang then with thy laughter, ghost of thee, 
That holds its shroud up with most delicate, 
Dead fingers, and behind the ghost of me, 

Tripping fantastic with a mouth that jeers 
At roseal flowers of youth the turbid streams 
Toss in derision down the barren years 
To death the host of all our golden dreams. 



(106) 



AFTER PAUL VERLAINE 
I 

II pleut doucement sur la ville. 

Rimbauh 

Tears fall within mine heart, 
As rain upon the town: 
Whence does this languor start, 
Possessing all mine heart? 

O sweet fall of the rain 
Upon the earth and roofs!- 
Unto an heart in pain, 
O music of the rain! 

Tears that have no reason 
Fall in my sorry heart: 
What! there was no treason £ 
This grief hath no reason. 

Nay! the more desolate, 
Because, I know not why, 
(Neither for love nor hate)' 
Mine heart is desolate. 



(107) 



AFTER PAUL VERLAINE 
II 

Colloque Sentimental 

Into the lonely park all frozen fast, 
Awhile ago there were two forms who passed. 

Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead, 
Hardly shall a man hear the words they said. 

Into the lonely park, all frozen fast, 

There came two shadows who recall the past. 

"Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?" — 
"Wherefore should I possess that memory?" — • 

"Doth thine heart beat at my sole name alway? 
Still dost thou see my soul in visions?" "Nay! w *-t 

"They were fair days of joy unspeakable, 

Whereon our lips were joined?" — "I cannot tell."^ 

"Were not the heavens blue, was not hope high?"< — 
"Hope has fled vanquished down the darkling sky.*es§ 

So through the barren oats they wandered, 
And the night only heard the words they said. 



(iog) 



AFTER PAUL VERLAINE 
III 

Spleen 

Around were all the roses red, 
The ivy all around was black. 

Dear, so thou only move thine head. 
Shall all mine old despairs awake! 

Too blue, too tender was the sky, 
The air too soft, too green the sea. 

Always I fear, I know not why, 
Some lamentable flight from thee. 

I am so tired of holly-sprays 
And weary of the bright box-tree, 

Of all the endless country ways; 
Of everything alas! save thee. 



(too) 



AFTER PAUL VERLAINE 
IV 

The sky is up above the roof 

So blue, so soft! 
A tree there, up above the roof, 

Swayeth aloft. 

A bell within that sky we see, 

Chimes low and faint: 
A bird upon that tree we see, 

Maketh complaint. 

Dear God! is not the life up there, 

Simple and sweet? 
How peacefully are borne up there 

Sounds of the street! 

What hast thou done, who comest here, 

To weep alway? 
Where hast thou laid, who comest here, 

Thy youth away? 



(no) 



TO HIS MISTRESS 

There comes an end to summer, 

To spring showers and hoar rime;' 
His mumming to each mummer 

Has somewhere end in time, 
And since life ends and laughter, 

And leaves fall and tears dry, 
Who shall call love immortal, 

When all that is must die? 

Nay, sweet, let's leave unspoken 

The vows the fates gainsay, 
For all vows made are broken, 

We love but while we may. 
Let's kiss when kissing pleases, 

And part when kisses pall, 
Perchance, this time to-morrow, 

We shall not love at all. 

You ask my love completest, 

As strong next year as now, 
The devil take you, sweetest, 

Ere I make aught such vow. 
Life is a masque that changes, 

A fig for constancy! 
No love at all were better, 

Than love which is not free. 



(in) 



JADIS 

Erewhile, before the world was old, 
When violets grew and celandine, 
In Cupid's train we were enrolled: 

Erewhile! 
Your little hands were clasped in mine, 
Your head all ruddy and sun-gold 
Lay on my breast which was your shrine, 
And all the tale of love was told: 
Ah, God, that sweet things should decline, 
And fires fade out which were not cold, 

Erewhile. 



r (ii2) 



IN A BRETON CEMETERY 

They sleep well here, 

These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days 

In fierce Atlantic ways; 
And found not there, 

Beneath the long curled wave, 

So quiet a grave. 

And they sleep well 

These peasant-folk, who told their lives away, 

From day to market-day, 
As one should tell, 

With patient industry, 

Some sad old rosary. 

And now night falls, 

Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post, 

A poor worn ghost, 
This quiet pasture calls; 

And dear dead people with pale hands 

Beckon me to their lands. 



(113) 



JO WILLIAM THEODORE PETERS ON HIS 
RENAISSANCE CLOAK 

The cherry-coloured velvet of your cloak 
Time hath not soiled: its fair embroideries 

Gleam as when centuries ago they spoke 
To what bright gallant of Her Daintiness, 
Whose slender fingers, long since dust and dead, 
For love or courtesy embroidered 

The cherry-coloured velvet of this cloak. 

Ah! cunning flowers of silk and silver thread, 
That mock mortality? the broidering dame, 

The page they decked, the kings and courts are dead: 
Gone the age beautiful; Lorenzo's name, 
The Borgia's pride are but an empty sound; 
But lustrous still upon their velvet ground, 

Time spares these flowers of silk and silver thread. 

Gone is that age of pageant and of pride: 
Yet don your cloak, and haply it shall seem, 

The curtain of old time is set aside; 

As through the sadder coloured throng you gleam ; 
We see once more fair dame and gallant gay, 
The glamour and the grace of yesterday: 

The elder, brighter age of pomp and pride. 



(»4) 



THE SEA-CHANGE 

Where river and ocean meet in a great tempestuous 
frown, 

Beyond the bar, where on the dunes the white-capped 
rollers break; 

Above, one windmill stands forlorn on the arid, grassy- 
down: 

I will set my sail on a stormy day and cross the bar 
and seek 

That I have sought and never found, the exquisite one 
crown, 

Which crowns one day with all its calm the passionate 
and the weak. 

When the mad winds are unreined, wilt thou not storm, 

my sea? 
(I have ever loved thee so, I have ever done thee wrong 
In drear terrestrial ways.) When I trust myself to thee 
With a last great hope, arise and sing thine ultimate, 

great song 
Sung to so many better men, O sing at last to me, 
That which when once a man has heard, he heeds not 

over long. 

I will bend my sail when the great day comes; thy kisses 

on my face 
Shall seal all things that are old, outworn; and anger 

and regret 
Shall fade as the dreams and days shall fade, and in 

thy salt embrace, 
When thy fierce caresses blind mine eyes and my limbs 

grow stark and set, 
All that I know in all my mind shall no more have a 

place: 

The weary ways of men and one woman I shall forget. 

Point du Pouldu. 
("5) 



DREGS 

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof 
(This is the end of every song man sings! ) 
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain, 
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain; 
And health and hope have gone the way of love 
Into the drear oblivion of lost things. 
Ghosts go along with us until the end; 
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend. 
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait 
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate: 
This is the end of all the songs man sings. 



(116) 



A SONG 

All that a man may pray, 
Have I not prayed to thee? 

What were praise left to say, 
Has not been said by me 
O, ma mie? 

Yet thine eyes and thine heart, 
Always were dumb to me: 

Only to be my part, 

Sorrow has come from thee, 
0, ma mie? 

Where shall I seek and hide 

My grief away with me? 
Lest my bitter tears should chide, 

Bring brief dismay to thee, 
O, ma mie? 

More than a man may pray, 
Have I not prayed to thee? 

What were praise left to say, 
' Has not been said by me, 
O, ma mie? 



r («7) 






BRETON AFTERNOON 

Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats 

through the sun-stained air, 
On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours 

long and heard 
Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer, 
And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird. 

On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush 

me and repose, 
And the world fades into a dream and a spell is cast cm 

me; 
And what was all the strife about, for the myrtle or the 

rose, 
And why have I wept for a white girVs paleness passing 

ivory! 

Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a land alone, 

apart, 
In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of 

life and death, 
Here will I lie while the clouds fly by and delve an hole 

where my heart 
May sleep deep down with the gorse above and red, red 

earth beneath. 

Sleep and be quiet for an afternoon, till the rose-white 

angelus 
Softly steals my way from the village under the hill: 
Mother of God, Misericord, look down in pity on us, 
The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak 

ourselves such ill. 



(118) 



VENITE DESCEND AMUS 

Let be at last; give over words and sighing, 

Vainly were all things said: 
Better at last to find a place for lying, 

Only dead. • 

Silence were best, with songs and sighing over; 

Now be the music mute; 
Now let the dead, red leaves of autumn cover 

A vain lute. 

Silence is best: for ever and for ever, 

We will go down and sleep, 
Somewhere beyond her ken, where she need never 

Come to weep. 

Let be at last: colder she grows and colder; 

Sleep and the night were best; 
Lying at last where we cannot behold her 5 

We may rest. 



(119) 



TRANSITION 

A little while to walk with thee, dear child; 

To lean on thee my weak and weary head; 
Then evening comes: the winter sky is wild, 

The leafless trees are black, the leaves long dead. 

A little while to hold thee and to stand, 
By harvest-fields of bending golden corn; 

Then the predestined silence, and thine hand, 
Lost in the night, long and weary and forlorn. 

A little while to love thee, scarcely time 

To love thee well enough; then time to part, 

To fare through wintry fields alone and climb 
The frozen hills, not knowing where thou art. 

Short summer-time and then, my heart's desire, 
The winter and the darkness: one by one 

The roses fall, the pale roses expire 
Beneath the slow decadence of the sun. 



(120) 



EXCHANGES 

All that I had I brought, 

Little enough I know; 
A poor rhyme roughly wrought, 

A rose to match thy snow: 
All that I had I brought. 

Little enough I sought: 
But a word compassionate, 

A passing glance, or thought, 
For me outside the gate: 

Little enough I sought. 

Little enough I found: 

All that you had, perchance! 

With the dead leaves on the ground, 
I dance the devil's dance. 

All that you had I found. 



(121) 



TO A LADY ASKING FOOLISH QUESTIONS 

Why am I sorry, Chloe? Because the moon is far: 
And who am I to be straitened in a little earthly star? 

Because thy face is fair? And what if it had not been, 
The fairest face of all is the face I have not seen. 

Because the land is cold, and however I scheme and plot, 
I cannot find a ferry to the land where I am not. 

Because thy lips are red and thy breasts upbraid the 

snow? 
(There is neither white nor red in the pleasance where 

I go.) 

Because thy lips grow pale and thy breasts grow dun 

and fall? 
I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at 

all. 



(122) 



RONDEAU 

Ah, Manon, say, why is it we 

Are one and all so fain of thee? 

Thy rich red beauty debonnaire 

In very truth is not more fair, 

Than the shy grace and purity 

That clothe the maiden maidenly; 

Her gray eyes shine more tenderly 

And not less bright than thine her hair, 

Ah, Manon, say! 
Expound, I pray, the mystery 
Why wine-stained lip and languid eye, 
And most unsaintly Maenad air, 
Should move us more than all the rare 
|White roses of virginity? 

Ah ; Manon, say! 



(123) 



MORITURA 

A song of the setting sun! 

The sky in the west is red, 
And the day is all but done: 

While yonder up overhead, 
All too soon, 
There rises, so cold, the cynic moon. 

A song of a winter day! 

The wind of the north doth blow, 
From a sky that's chill and gray, 

On fields where no crops now grow, 
Fields long shorn 
Of bearded barley and golden corn. 

A song of an old, old man! 

His hairs are white and his gaze, 
Long bleared in his visage wan, 

With its weight of yesterdays, 
Joylessly 
He stands and mumbles and looks at me. 

A song of a faded flower! 

'Twas plucked in the tender bud, 
And fair and fresh for an hour, 

In a lady's hair it stood. 
Now, ah, now, 
Faded it lies in the dust and low. 



(124) 



LIBERA ME 

Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! 
Long have I served thine altars, serve me now at the end, 
Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, 
send. 

Heart of my heart have I offered thee, pain of my pain, 
Yielding my life for the love of thee into thy chain; 
Lady and goddess be merciful, loose me again. 

All things I had that were fairest, my dearest and best, 
Fed the fierce flames on thine altar: ah, surely, my breast 
Shrined thee alone among goddesses, spurning the rest. 

Blossom of youth thou hast plucked of me, flower of my 

days; 
Stinted I nought in thine honouring, walked in thy ways, 
Song of my soul pouring out to thee, all in thy praise. 

Fierce was the flame while it lasted, and strong was thy 

wine, 
Meet for immortals that die not, for throats such as 

thine, 
Too fierce for bodies of mortals, too potent for mine. 

Blossom and bloom hast thou taken, now render to me 
Ashes of life that remain to me, few though they be, 
Truce of the love of thee, Cyprian, let me go free. 

Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, restore 
Life to the limbs of me, liberty, hold me no more 
Having the first-fruits and flower of me, cast me the core. 



(125) 



TO A LOST LOVE 

I seek no more to bridge the gulf that lies 

Betwixt our separate ways; 

For vainly my heart prays, 
Hope droops her head and dies; 
I see the sad, tired answer in your eyes. 

I did not heed, and yet the stars were clear; 

Dreaming that love could mate 

Lives grown so separate; — 
But at the best, my dear, 
I see we should not have been very near. 

I knew the end before the end was nigh: 

The stars have grown so plain; 

Vainly I sigh, in vain 
For things that come to some, 
But unto you and me will never come. 



(126) 



WISDOM 

tovE wine and beauty and the spring, 
While wine is red and spring is here, 

And through the almond blossoms ring 
The dove-like voices of thy Dear. 

Love wine and spring and beauty while 

The wine hath flavour and spring masks 
Her treachery in so soft a smile 
, That none may think of toil and tasks. 

But when spring goes on hurrying feet, 
Look not thy sorrow in the eyes, 

And bless thy freedom from thy sweet: 
This is the wisdom of the wise. 



(127) 



IN SPRING 

See how the trees and the osiers lithe 

Are green bedecked and the woods are blithe, 

The meadows have donned their cape of flowers, 

The air is soft with the sweet May showers, 
And the birds make melody: 

But the spring of the soul, the spring of the soul, 
Cometh no more for you or for me. 

The lazy hum of the busy bees 

Murmureth through the almond trees; 

The jonquil flaunteth a gay, blonde head, 

The primrose peeps from a mossy bed, 
And the violets scent the lane. 

But the flowers of the soul, the flowers of the soul, 
For you and for me bloom never again. 



(128) 



A LAST WORD 

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand; 

The day is overworn, the birds all flown; 

And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; 
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land, 
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand 

Laughter or tears, for we have only known 

Surpassing vanity: vain things alone 
Have driven our perverse and aimless band. 

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold, 
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust 
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old, 

Freedom to all from love and fear and lust. 

Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold 

Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust. 



X129) 



DILEMMAS 
STORIES AND STUDIES IN SENTIMENT 

(First Published in Book Form in 1895) 






THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

ist October, 188 — 

Hotel du Lys, Bruges. 
After all, few places appeal to my imagination more po- 
tently than this autumnal old city — the most mediaeval 
town in Europe. I am glad that I have come back here 
at last. It is melancholy indeed, but then at my age 
one's pleasures are chiefly melancholy. One is essentially 
of the autumn, and it is always autumn at Bruges. I 
thought I had been given back my youth when I awoke 
this morning and heard the Carillon, chiming out, as it 
has done, no doubt, intermittently, since I heard it last 
— twenty years ago. Yes, for a moment, I thought I was 
young again — only for a moment. When I went out into 
the streets and resumed acquaintance with all my old 
haunts, the illusion had gone. I strolled into Saint 
Sauveur's, wandered a while through its dim, dusky 
aisles, and then sat down near the high altar, where the 
air was heaviest with stale incense, and indulged in retro- 
spect. I was there for more than an hour. I doubt 
whether it was quite wise. At my time of life one had 
best keep out of cathedrals; they are vault-like places, 
pregnant with rheumatism — at best they are full of 
ghosts. And a good many revenants visited me during 
that hour of meditation. Afterwards I paid a visit to the 
Memlings in the Hopital. Nothing has altered very 
much; even the women, with their placid, ugly Flemish 
faces, sitting eternally in their doorways with the eternal 
lace-pillow, might be the same women. In the afternoon 

(i33) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

I went to the Beguinage, and sat there long in the shadow 
of a tree, which must have grown up since my time, I 
think. I sat there too long, I fear, until the dusk and 
the chill drove me home to dinner. On the whole per- 
haps it was a mistake to come back. The sameness of 
this terribly constant old city seems to intensify the 
change that has come to oneself. Perhaps if I had come 
back with Lorimer I should have noticed it less. For, 
after all, the years have been kind to me, on the whole; 
they have given me most things which I set my heart 
upon, and if they had not broken a most perfect friend- 
ship, I would forgive them the rest. I sometimes feel, 
however, that one sacrifices too much to one's success. 
To slave twenty years at the Indian bar has its draw- 
backs, even when it does leave one at fifty, prosperous 
a mourir d 'ennui. Yes, I must admit that I am prosper- 
ous, disgustingly prosperous, and — my wife is dead, and 
Lorimer — Lorimer has altogether passed out of my life. 
Ah, it is a mistake to keep a journal — a mistake. 

3rd October. 
I vowed yesterday that I would pack my portmanteau 
and move on to Brussels, but to-day finds me still at 
Bruges. The charm of the old Flemish city grows on 
me. To-day I carried my peregrinations further a-fiekL 
I wandered about the Quais and stood on the old bridge 
where one obtains such a perfect glimpse, through a 
trellis of chestnuts, of the red roof and spires of Notre 
Dame. But the particular locality matters nothing; 
every nook and corner of Bruges teems with reminis- 
cences. And how fresh they are! At Bombay I had 
not time to remember or to regret; but to-day the whole 
dead and forgotten story rises up like a ghost to haunt 
me. At times, moreover, I have a curious, fantastic 
feeling, that some day or other, in some mildewing 

(134) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

church, I shall come face to face with Lorimer. He was 
older than I, he must be greatly altered, but I should 
know him. It is strange how intensely I desire to meet 
him. I suppose it is chiefly curiosity. I should 
like to feel sure of him, to explain his silence. He can- 
not be dead. I am told that he had pictures in this last 
Academy — and yet, never to have written — never once, 
through all these years. I suppose there are few friend- 
ships which can stand the test of correspondence. Still 
it is inexplicable, it is not like Lorimer. He could 
not have harboured a grudge against me — for what? A 
boyish infatuation for a woman who adored him, and 
whom he adored. The idea is preposterous, they must 
have laughed over my folly often, of winter evenings by 
their fireside. For they married, they must have mar- 
ried, they were made for each other and they knew it. 
Was their marriage happy I wonder? Was it as success- 
ful as mine, though perhaps a little less commonplace? 
It is strange, though, that I never heard of it, that he 
never wrote to me once, not through all those years. 

4tk October. 

Inexplicable! Inexplicable! Did they marry after 
all? Could there have been some gigantic misunder- 
standing? I paid a pilgrimage this morning which hith- 
erto I had deferred, I know not precisely why. I went 
to the old house in the Rue d'Alva — where she lived, our 
Comtesse. And the sight of its grim, historic frontal 
made twenty years seem as yesterday. I meant to con- 
tent myself with a mere glimpse at the barred windows, 
but the impulse seized me to ring the bell which I used 
to ring so often. It was a foolish, fantastic impulse, 
but I obeyed it. I found it was occupied by an English- 
man, a Mr. Venables — there seem to be more English 
here than in my time — and I sent in my card and asked 

(i3S) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

If I might see the famous dining-room. There was no 
objection raised, my host was most courteous, my name, 
he said, was familiar to him ; he is evidently proud of his 
dilapidated old palace, and has had the grace to save it 
from the attentions of the upholsterer. No! twenty 
years have produced very little change in the room where 
we had so many pleasant sittings. The ancient stamped 
leather on the walls is perhaps a trifle more ragged, the 
old oak panels not blacker — that were impossible — but a 
trifle more worm-eaten; it is the same room. I must 
have seemed a sad boor to my polite cicerone as I stood, 
hat in hand, and silently took in all the old familiar de- 
tails. The same smell of mildewed antiquity, I could 
almost believe the same furniture. And indeed my host 
tells me that he took over the house as it was, and that 
some of the chairs and tables are scarcely more youthful 
than the walls. Yes, there by the huge fireplace was 
the same quaintly carved chair where she always sat. 
Ah, those delicious evenings when one was five-and- 
twenty. For the moment I should not have been sur- 
prised if she had suddenly taken shape before my eyes, 
in the old seat, the slim, girlish woman in her white dress, 
her hands folded in her lap, her quiet eyes gazing dream- 
ily into the red fire, a subtile air of distinction in her 
whole posture. .... She would be old now, I sup- 
pose. Would she? Ah no, she was not one of the 

women who grow old I caught up the thread 

of my host's discourse just as he was pointing it with a 
sharp rap upon one of the most time-stained panels. 

'Behind there,' he remarked, with pardonable pride, ( is 
the secret passage where the Due d'Alva was assassi- 
nated.' 

I smiled apologetically. 

'Yes,' I said, 'I know it. I should explain perhaps — 
(136) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

my excuse for troubling you was not merely historic 
curiosity. I have more personal associations with this 
room. I spent some charming hours in it a great many 
years ago — ' and for the moment I had forgotten that I 
was nearly fifty. 

'Ah/ he said, with interest, 'you know the late people, 
the Fontaines.' 

'No/ I said, 'I am afraid I have never heard of them. 
I am very ancient. In my time it belonged to the Sav- 
aresse family.' 

'So I have heard/ he said, 'but that was long ago. I 
have only had it a few years. Fontaine my landlord 
bought it from them. Did you know M. le Comte!' 

'No/ I answered, 'Madame la Comtesse. She was left 
a widow very shortly after her marriage. I never knew 
M. le Comtek 

My host shrugged his shoulders. 

'From all accounts/ he said, 'you did not lose very 
much.' 

'It was an unhappy marriage/ I remarked, vaguely, 
'most unhappy. Her second marriage promised greater 
felicity.' 

Mr. Venables looked at me curiously. 

'I understood/ he began, but he broke off abruptly. 
'I did not know Madame de Savaresse married again.' 

His tone had suddenly changed, it had grown less cor- 
dial, and we parted shortly afterwards with a certain con- 
straint. And as I walked home pensively curious, his 
interrupted sentence puzzled me. Does he look upon me 
as an impostor, a vulgar gossip-monger? What has he 
heard, what does he know of her? Does he know any- 
thing? I cannot help believing so. I almost wish I had 
asked him definitely, but he would have misunderstood 
my motives. Yet, even so, I wish I had asked him. 

(137) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

6th October, 
I am still living constantly in the past, and the fantas- 
tic feeling, whenever I enter a church or turn a corner 
that I shall meet Lorimer again, has grown into a settled 
conviction. Yes, I shall meet him, and in Bruges. . . . 
It is strange how an episode which one has thrust away 
out of sight and forgotten for years will be started back 
into renewed life by the merest trifle. And for the last 
week it has all been as vivid as if it happened yesterday. 
To-night I have been putting questions to myself — so 
far with no very satisfactory answer. Was it a boyish 
infatuation after all? Has it passed away as utterly as I 
believed? I can see her face now as I sit by the fire 
with the finest precision of detail. I can hear her voice, 
that soft, low voice, which was none the less sweet for its 
modulation of sadness. I think there are no women like 
her now-a-days — none, none! Did she marry Lorimer? 
and if not — ? It seems strange now that we should have 
both been so attracted, and yet not strange when one 
considers it. At least we were never jealous of one an- 
other. How the details rush back upon one! I think 
we must have fallen in love with her at the same moment 
— for we were together when we saw her for the first 
time, we were together when we went first to call on her 
in the Rue d'Alva — I doubt if we ever saw her except 
together. It was soon after we began to get intimate 
that she wore white again. She told us that we had 
given her back her youth. She joined our sketching ex- 
peditions with the most supreme contempt for les con- 
venances; when she was not fluttering round, passing 
from Lorimer's canvas to mine with her sweetly incon- 
sequent criticism, she sat in the long grass and read to 
us — Andre Chenier and Lamartine. In the evening we 
went to see her; she denied herself to the rest of the 
world, and we sat for hours in that ancient room in the 

(138) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

delicious twilight, while she sang to us — she sang divinely 
— little French chansons, gay and sad, and snatches 
of operette. How we adored her! I think she knew 
from the first how it would be and postponed it as long 
as she could. But at last she saw that it was inevitable. 
... I remember the last evening that we were there — 
remember — shall I ever forget it? We had stayed be- 
yond our usual hour and when we rose to go ¥/e all of 
us knew that those pleasant irresponsible evenings had 
come to an end. And both Lorimer and I stood for a 
moment on the threshold before we said good-night, feel- 
ing I suppose that one of us was there for the last time. 
And how graceful, how gracious she was as she held 
out one little white hand to Lorimer and one to me. 
'Good-night, dear friends,' she said, 'I like you both so 
much — so much. Believe me, I am grateful to you both 
— for having given me back my faith in life, in friend- 
ship, believe that, will you not, tnes amis?' Then for 
just one delirious moment her eyes met mine and it 
seemed to me — ah, well, after all it was Lorimer she 
loved. 

yth October. 
It seems a Quixotic piece of folly now, our proposal 
we would neither take advantage of the other, but we 
both of us must speak. We wrote to her at the same 
time and likely enough, in the same words, we posted our 
letters by the same post. To-day I had the curiosity to 
take out her answer to me from my desk, and I read it 
quite calmly and dispassionately, the poor yellow letter 
with the faded ink, which wrote 'Finis' to my youth and 
made a man of me. 

'Pauvre cher Ami/ she wrote to me, and when I had 
read that, for the first time in my life and the only time 

(i39) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

Lorimer's superiority was bitter to me. The rest I de- 
ciphered through scalding tears. 

'Pauvre cher Ami, I am very sorry for you, and yet 
I think you should have guessed and have spared your- 
self this pain, and me too a little. No, my friend, that 
which you ask of me is impossible. You are my dear 
friend, but it is your brother whom I love — your brother, 
for are you not as brothers, and I cannot break your 
beautiful friendship. No, that must not be. See, I ask 
one favour of you — I have written also to him, only one 
little word "Viens," — but will you not go to him and 
tell him for me? Ah, my brother, my heart bleeds for 
you. I too have suffered in my time. You will go away 
now, yes, that is best, but you will return when this fancy 
of yours has passed. Ah forgive me — that I am happy — 
forgive us, forgive me. Let us still be friends. Adieu! 
Au revoir. 

Thy Sister, 

'Delphine/ 

I suppose it was about an hour later that I took out 
my letter to Lorimer. I told him as I told myself, that it 
was the fortune of war, that she had chosen the better 
man, but I could not bear to stay and see their happi- 
ness. I was in London before the evening. I wanted 
work, hard, grinding work, I was tired of being a brief- 
less barrister, and as it happened, an Indian opening of- 
fered itself at the very moment when I had decided that 
Europe had become impossible to me. I accepted it, and 
so those two happy ones passed out of my life. 

Twenty years ago! and in spite of his promise he has 
never written from that day till this, not so much as a 
line to tell me of his marriage. I made a vow then 
that I would get over my folly, and it seemed to me that 

(140) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

my vow was kept. And yet here to-day, in Bruges, 
I am asking myself whether after all it has been such 
a great success, whether sooner or later one does not 
have to pay for having been hard and strong, for re- 
fusing to suffer. ... I must leave this place, it is too 
full of Madame de Savaresse. . . . Is it curiosity 
which is torturing me? I must find Lorimer. If he 
married her, why has he been so persistently silent? If 
he did not marry her, what in Heaven's name does it 
mean? These are vexing questions. 

10th October. 
In the Church of the Dames Rouges, I met to-day my 
old friend Sebastian Lorimer. Strange! Strange! He 
was greatly altered, I wonder almost that I recognised 
him. I had strolled into the church for benediction, for 
the first time since I have been back here, and when the 
service was over and I swung back the heavy door, with 
the exquisite music of the 'O Salutaris,' sung by those 
buried women behind the screen still echoing in my ear, 
I paused a moment to let a man pass by me. It was 
Lorimer, he looked wild and worn; it was no more than 
the ghost of my old friend. I was shocked and startled 
by his manner. We shook hands quite impassively as if 
we had parted yesterday. He talked in a rambling way 
as we walked towards my hotel, of the singing of the 
nuns, of the numerous religious processions, of the 
blessed doctrine of the intercession of saints. The old 
melodious voice was unchanged, but it was pitched in the 
singularly low key which I have noticed some foreign 
priests acquire who live much in churches. I gather that 
he has become a Catholic. I do not know what intangible 
instinct, or it may be fear, prevented me from putting 
to him the vital question which has so perplexed me. 
It is astonishing how his face has changed, what an ex- 

(ho 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

traorciinary restlessness his speech and eye have acquired. 
It never was so of old. My first impression was that he 
was suffering from some acute form of nervous disorder, 
but before I left him a more unpleasant suspicion was 
gradually forced upon me. I cannot help thinking that 
there is more than a touch of insanity in my old friend. 
I tried from time to time to bring him down to personal 
topics, but he eluded them dexterously, and it was only 
for a moment or so that I could keep him away from 
the all absorbing subject of the Catholic Church, which 
seems in some of its more sombre aspects to exercise an 
extraordinary fascination over him. I asked him if he 
often visited Bruges. 

He looked up at me with a curious expression of sur- 
prise. 

'I live here,' he said, 'almost always.' I have done so 
for years. . . .' Presently he added hurriedly, 'You 
have come back. I thought you would come back, but 
you have been gone a long time — oh, a long time! It 
seems years since we met. Do you remember — ?' He 
checked himself; then he added in a low whisper, 'We 
all come back, we all come back.' 

He uttered a quaint, short laugh. 

'One can be near — very near, even if one can never 
be quite close.' 

He tells me that he still paints, and that the Academy, 
to which he sends a picture yearly, has recently elected 
him an Associate. But his art does not seem to absorb 
him as it did of old, and he speaks of his success drily 
and as a matter of very secondary importance. He re- 
fused to dine with me, alleging an engagement, but that 
so hesitatingly and with such vagueness that I could per- 
ceive it was the merest pretext. His manner was so 
strange and remote that I did not venture to press him. 
I think he is unhappily conscious of his own frequent in- 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

coherencies and at moments there are quite painful 
pauses when he is obviously struggling with dumb 
piteousness to be lucid, to collect himself and pick up 
certain lost threads in his memory. He is coming to 
see me this evening, at his own suggestion, and I am 
waiting for him now with a strange terror oppressing me. 
I cannot help thinking that he possesses the key to all 
that has so puzzled me, and that to-night he will en- 
deavour to speak. 

nth October. 
Poor Lorimer! I have hardly yet got over the shock 
which his visit last night caused me, and the amazement 
with which I heard and read between the lines of his 
strange confession. His once clear reason is, I fear, 
hopelessly obscured, and how much of his story is hal- 
lucination, I cannot say. His notions of time and place 
are quite confused, and out of his rambling statement 
I can only be sure of one fact. It seems that he has 
done me a great wrong, an irreparable wrong, which he 
has since bitterly repented. 

And in the light of this poor wretch's story, a great 
misunderstanding is rolled away, and I am left with the 
conviction that the last twenty years have been after 
all a huge blunder, an irrevocable and miserable mistake. 
Through my own rash precipitancy and Lorimer's weak 
treachery, a trivial mischance that a single word would 
have rectified, has been prolonged beyond hope of re- 
dress. It seems that after all it was not Lorimer whom 
she chose. Madame de Savaresse writing to us both 
twenty years ago, made a vital and yet not inexplicable 
mistake. She confused her envelopes, and the letter 
which I received was never meant for me, although it 
was couched in such ambiguous terms that until to-day 
the possibility of this error never dawned on me. And 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

my letter, the one little word of which she spoke, was 
sent to Lorimer. Poor wretch! he did me a vital injury 
— yes, I can say that now — a vital injury, but on the 
whole I pity him. To have been suddenly dashed down 
from the pinnacles of happiness, it must have been a 
cruel blow. He tells me that when he saw her that after- 
noon and found out his mistake, he had no thought ex- 
cept to recall me. He actually came to London for that 
purpose, vowed to her solemnly that he would bring me 
back; it was only in England, that, to use his own dis- 
traught phrase, the Devil entered into possession of him. 
His half-insane ramblings gave me a very vivid idea of 
that fortnight during which he lay hid in London, 
trembling like a guilty thing, fearful at every moment 
that he might run across me and yet half longing for the 
meeting with the irresoluteness of the weak nature, which 
can conceive and to a certain extent execute a lackete, 
yet which would always gladly yield to circumstance and 
let chance or fate decide the issue. And to the very last 
Lorimer was wavering — had almost sought me out, and 
thrown himself on my mercy, when the news came that 
I had sailed. 

Destiny who has no weak scruples, had stepped in and 
sealed Delphine's mistake for all time, after her grim 
tfashion. When he went back to Bruges, and saw 
Madame de Savaresse, I think she must have partly 
guessed his baseness. Lorimer was not strong enough to 
be a successful hypocrite, and that meeting, I gather, 
was also their final parting. She must have said things 
to him in her beautiful quiet voice which he has never 
forgotten. He went away and each day he was going 
to write to me, and each day he deferred it, and then 
he took up the Times one morning and read the an- 
nouncement of my marriage. After that it seemed to 
him that he could only be silent. . . . 

(i44) 



THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

Did she know of it too? Did she suffer or did she un- 
derstand? Poor woman! poor woman! I wonder if she 
consoled herself, as I did, and if so how she looks back 
en her success? I wonder whether she is happy, whether 
she is dead? I suppose these are questions which will 
remain unanswered. And yet when Lorimer left me at 
a late hour last night, it seemed to me that the air was 
full of unspoken words. Does he know anything of her 
now! I have a right to ask him these things. And to- 
morrow I am to meet him, he made the request most 
strangely — at the same place where we fell in with each 
other to-day — until to-morrow then! 

12th October. 
I have just left Sebastian Lorimer at the Church of 
the Dames Rouges. I hope I was not cruel, but there 
are some things which one can neither forget nor forgive, 
and it seemed to me that v/hen I knew the full measure 
of the ruin he had wrought, my pity for him withered 
away. 'X hope, Lorimer/ I said, 'that we may never 
meet again.' And, honestty, I cannot forgive him. If 
she had been happy, if she had let time deal gently 
with her — ah yes, even if she were dead — it might be 
easier. But that this living entombment, this hopeless 
death in life should befall her, she so magnificently 
fitted for life's finer offices, ah, the pity of it, the pity of 
it! ... . But let me set down the whole sad story as 
it dawned upon me this afternoon in that unearthly 
church. I was later than the hour appointed; vespers 
were over and a server, taper in hand, was gradually 
transforming the gloom of the high altar into a blaze of 
light. With a strange sense of completion I took my 
place next to the chair by which Lorimer, with bowed 
head, was kneeling, his eyes fixed with a strange intent- 
ness on the screen which separated the outer worshippers 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

from the chapel or gallery which was set apart for the 
nuns. His lips moved from time to time spasmodically, in 
prayer or ejaculation: then as the jubilant organ burst out, 
and the officiating priest in his dalmatic of cloth of gold 
passed from the sacristy and genuflected at the altar, he 
seemed to be listening in a very passion of attention. 
But as the incense began to fill the air, and the Litany of 
Loreto smote on my ear to some sorrowful, undulating 
Gregorian, I lost thought of the wretched man beside me; 
I forgot the miserable mistake that he had perpetuated, 
and I was once more back in the past — with Delphine — 
kneeling by her side. Strophe by strophe that perfect 
litany rose and was lost in a cloud of incense, in the 
mazy arches of the roof. 

'Janua coeli, 
Stella matutina, 
Salus infirmorum, Ora pro nobis !' 

In strophe and antistrophe: the melancholy, nasal in- 
tonation of the priest died away, and the exquisite wom- 
en's voices in the gallery took it up with exultation, and 
yet with something like a sob — a sob of limitation. 

'Refugium peccatorum, 
Consolatrix afflictorum, 
Auxilium Christianorum, Ora pro nobis !' 

And so on through all the exquisite changes of the 
hymn, until the time of the music changed, and the 
priest intoned the closing line. 

'Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix!' 

and the voices in the gallery answered: 

'Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.' 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

There was one voice which rose above all the others, 
a voice of marvellous sweetness and power, which from 
the first moment had caused me a curious thrill. And 
presently Lorimer bent down and whispered to me: c So 
near/ he murmured, 'and yet so far away — so near, and 
yet never quite close!' 

But before he had spoken I had read in his rigid 
face, in his eyes fixed with such a passion of regret on 
the screen, why we were there — whose voice it was we 
had listened to. 

I rose and went out of the church quietly and hastily; 
I felt that to stay there one moment longer would be 
suffocation. . . . Poor woman! so this is how she sought 
consolation, in religion! Well, there are different ways 
for different persons — and for me — what is there left for 
me? Oh, many things, no doubt, many things. Still, 
for once and for the last time, let me set myself down 
as a dreary fraud. I never forgot her, not for one hour 
or day, not even when it seemed to me that I had for- 
gotten her most, not even when I married. No woman 
ever represented to me the same idea as Madame de 
Savaresse. No woman's voice was ever sweet to me 
after hers, the touch of no woman's hand ever made 
my heart beat one moment quicker for pleasure or for 
pain, since I pressed hers for the last time on that fate- 
ful evening twenty years ago. Even so — ! . . . 

When the service was over and the people had 
streamed out and dispersed, I went back for the last time 
into the quiet church. A white robed server was extin- 
guishing the last candle on the altar; only the one red 
light perpetually vigilant before the sanctuary, made 
more visible the deep shadows everywhere. 

Lorimer was still kneeling with bowed head in his 
place. Presently he rose and came towards me. 'She 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

was there — Delphine — you heard her. Ah, Dion, she 
loves you, she always loves you, you are avenged.' 

I gather that for years he has spent hours daily in this 
church, to be near her, and hear her voice, the magnifi- 
cent voice rising above all the other voices in the chants 
of her religion. But he will never see her, for is she not 
of the Dames Rouges? And I remember now all the 
stories of the Order, of its strictness, its austerity, its 
perfect isolation. And chiefly, I remember how they say 
that only twice after one of these nuns has taken her 
vows is she seen of any one except those of her com- 
munity; once, when she enters the Order, the door of 
the convent is thrown back and she is seen for a single 
moment in the scarlet habit of the Order, by the world, 
by all who care to gaze; and once more, at the last, when 
clad in the same coarse red garb, they bear her out quiet- 
ly, in her coffin, into the church. 

And of this last meeting, Lorimer, I gather, is always 
restlessly expectant, his whole life concentrated, as it 
were, in a very passion of waiting for a moment which 
will surely come. His theory, I confess, escapes me, nor 
can I guess how far a certain feverish remorse, an in- 
tention of expiation may be set as a guiding spring in 
his unhinged mind, and account, at least in part, for the 
fantastic attitude which he must have adopted for many 
years. If I cannot forgive him, at least I bear him no 
malice, and for the rest, our paths will hardly cross 
again. One takes up one's life and expiates its errors, 
each after one's several fashion — and my way is not 
Lorimer's. And now that it is all so clear, there is noth- 
ing to keep me here any longer, nothing to bring me 
back again. For it seemed to me to-day, strangely 
enough, as though a certain candle of hope, of promise, 
of pleasant possibilities, which had flickered with more 
or less light for so many years, had suddenly gone out 

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THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN 

and left me alone in utter darkness, as the knowledge was 
borne in upon me that henceforth Madame de Savaresse 
had passed altogether and finally out of my life. 
And so to-morrow — Brussels! 



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A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 



It was in Brittany, and the apples were already ac- 
quiring a ruddier, autumnal tint, amid their greens and 
yellows, though Autumn was not yet; and the country 
lay very still and fair in the sunset which had befallen, 
softly and suddenly as is the fashion there. A man and 
a girl stood looking down in silence at the village, Plou- 
mariel, from their post of vantage, half way up the hill: 
at its lichened church spire, dotted with little gables, 
like dove-cotes; at the slated roof of its market; at its 
quiet white houses. The man's eyes rested on it com- 
placently, with the enjoyment of the painter, finding 
it charming: the girl's, a little absently, as one who had 
seen it very often before. She was pretty and very- 
young, but her gray serious eyes, the poise of her head, 
with its rebellious brown hair braided plainly, gave her 
a little air of dignity, of reserve which sat piquantly upon 
her youth. In one ungloved hand, that was brown from 
the sun, but very beautiful, she held an old parasol, the 
other played occasionally with a bit of purple heather. 
Presently she began to speak, using English just coloured 
hy a foreign accent, that made her speech prettier. 

'You make me afraid/ she said, turning her large, 
troubled eyes on her companion, 'you make me afraid, 
of myself chiefly, but a little of you. You suggest so 
much to me that is new, strange, terrible. When you 
speak, I am troubled; all my old landmarks appear to 

(iSo) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

vanish; I even hardly know right from wrong. I love 
you, my God, how I love you! but I want to go away 
from you and pray in the little quiet church, where I 
made my first Communion. I will come to the world's 
end with you; but oh, Sebastian, do not ask me, let me 
go. You will forget me, I am a little girl to you, Sebas- 
tian. You cannot care very much for me.' 

The man looked down at her, smiling masterfully, but 
very kindly. He took the mutinous hand, with its little 
sprig of heather, and held it between his own. He seemed 
to find her insistence adorable; mentally, he was con- 
trasting her with all other women whom he had known, 
frowning at the memory of so many years in which she 
had no part. He was a man of more than forty, built 
large to an uniform English pattern; there was a touch 
of military erectness in his carriage which often deceived 
people as to his vocation. Actually, he had never been 
anything but artist, though he came of a family of sol- 
diers, and had once been war correspondent of an illus- 
trated paper. A certain distinction had always adhered 
to him, never more than now when he was no longer 
young, was growing bald, had streaks of gray in his 
moustache. His face, without being handsome, possessed 
a certain charm; it was worn and rather pale, the lines 
about the firm mouth were full of lassitude, the eyes 
rather tired. He had the air of having tasted widely, 
curiously, of life in his day, prosperous as he seemed 
now, that had left its mark upon him. His voice, which 
usually took an intonation that his friends found super- 
cilious, grew very tender in addressing this little French 
girl, with her quaint air of childish dignity. 

'Marie- Yvonne, foolish child, I will not hear one 
word more. You are a little heretic; and I am sorely 
tempted to seal your lips from uttering heresy. You tell 
me that you love me, and you ask me to let you go, in 

(ISO 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

one breath. The impossible conjuncture! Marie- Yvonne,' 
he added, more seriously, 'trust yourself to me, my 
child! You know, I will never give you up. You know 
that these months that I have been at Ploumariel, are 
worth all the rest of my life to me. It has been a diffi- 
cult life, hitherto, little one: change it for me; make it 
worth while. You would let morbid fancies come be- 
tween us. You have lived overmuch in that little church, 
with its worm-eaten benches, and its mildewed odour of 
dead people, and dead ideas. Take care, Marie- Yvonne: 
it had made you serious-eyed, before you have learnt to 
laugh; by and by, it will steal away your youth, before 
you have ever been young. I come to claim you, Marie- 
Yvonne, in the name of Life.' His words were half-jest- 
ing; his eyes were profoundly in earnest. He drew her 
to him gently; and when he bent down and kissed her 
forehead, and then her shy lips, she made no resistance: 
only, a little tremor ran through her. Presently, with 
equal gentleness, he put her away from him. 'You have 
already given me your answer, Marie- Yvonne. Believe 
me, you will never regret it. Let us go down? 

They took their way in silence towards the village; 
presently a bend of the road hid them from it, and he 
drew closer to her, helping her with his arm over the 
rough stones. Emerging, they had gone thirty yards so, 
before the scent of English tobacco drew their attention 
to a figure seated by the road-side, under a hedge; 
they recognised it, and started apart, a little consciously. 

'It is M. Tregellan,' said the young girl, flushing: 'and 
he must have seen us.' 

Her companion, frowning, hardly suppressed a little 
quick objurgation. 

'It makes no matter,' he observed, after a moment: 
'I shall see your uncle to-morrow and we know, good 

(152) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

man, how he wishes this; and, in any case, I would have 
told Tregellan.' 

The figure rose, as they drew near : he shook the ashes 
out of his briar, and removed it to his pocket. He was 
a slight man, with an ugly, clever face; his voice as he 
greeted them, was very low and pleasant. 

'You must have had a charming walk, Mademoiselle. 
I have seldom seen Plourmariel look better.' 

'Yes,' she said, gravely, 'it has been very pleasant. But 
I must not linger now,' she added breaking a little silence 
in which none of them seemed quite at ease. 'My uncle 
will be expecting me to supper.' She held out her hand, 
in the English fashion, to Tregellan, and then to Sebas- 
tian Murch, who gave the little fingers a private pres- 
sure. 

They had come into the market-place round which 
most of the houses in Ploumariel were grouped. They 
watched the young girl cross it briskly; saw her blue 
gown pass out of sight down a bye street: then they 
turned to their own hotel. It was a low, white house, 
belted half way down the front with black stone; a pic- 
torial object, as most Breton hostels. The ground floor 
was a cafe; and, outside it, a bench and long stained 
table enticed them to rest. They sat down, and ordered 
absinthes, as the hour suggested: these were brought to 
them presently by an old servant of the house; an ad- 
mirable figure, with the white sleeves and apron reliev- 
ing her linsey dress: with her good Breton face, and its 
effective wrinkles. For some time they sat in silence, 
drinking and smoking. The artist appeared to be ab- 
sorbed in contemplation of his drink; considering its 
clouded green in various lights. After a while the other 
looked up, and remarked, abruptly. 

'I may as well tell you that I happened to overlook 
you, just now, unintentionally.' 

(iS3) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

Sebastian Murch held up his glass, with absent eyes. 

'Don't mention it, my dear fellow/ he remarked, at 
last, urbanely. 

'I beg your pardon; but I am afraid I must.' 

He spoke with an extreme deliberation which sug- 
gested nervousness; with the air of a person reciting a 
little set speech, learnt imperfectly: and he looked very 
straight in front of him, out into the street, at two dogs 
quarrelling over some offal. 

'I daresay you will be angry: I can't avoid that; at 
least, I have known you long enough to hazard it. I 
have had it on my mind to say something. If I have 
been silent, it hasn't been because I have been blind, or 
approved. I have seen how it was all along. I gathered 
it from your letters when I was in England. Only until 
this afternoon I did not know how far it had gone, and 
now I am sorry I did not speak before.' 

He stopped short, as though he expected his friend's 
subtilty to come to his assistance; with admissions or 
recriminations. But the other was still silent, absent: his 
face wore a look of annoyed indifference. After a while, 
as Tregellan still halted, he observed quietly: 

'You must be a little more explicit. I confess I miss 
your meaning.' 

'Ah, don't be paltry,' cried the other, quickly. 'You 
know my meaning. To be very plain, Sebastian, are 
you quite justified in playing with that charming girl, in 
compromising her?' 

The artist looked up at last, smiling; his expressive 
mouth was set, not angrily, but with singular determina- 
tion. 

'With Mademoiselle Mitouard?' 

'Exactly; with the niece of a man whose guest you 
have recently been.' 

'My dear fellow!' he stopped a little, considering his 
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A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

words: 'You are hasty and uncharitable for such a very 
moral person! you jump at conclusions, Tregellan. I 
don't, you know, admit your right to question me: stilly 
as you have introduced the subject, I may as well satisfy 
you. I have asked Mademoiselle Mitouard to marry me, 
and she has consented, subject to her uncle's approval. 
And that her uncle, who happens to prefer the English 
method of courtship, is not likely to refuse.' 

The other held his cigar between two fingers, a little 
away; his curiously anxious face suggested that the ques- 
tion had become to him one of increased nicety. 

'I am sorry/ he said, after a moment; 'this is worse 
than I imagined; it's impossible.' 

'It is you that are impossible, Tregellan/ said Sebastian 
Murch. He looked at him now, quite frankly, absolutely: 
his eyes had a defiant light in them, as though he hoped 
to be criticised; wished nothing better than to stand on 
his defence, to argue the thing out. And Tregellan sat 
for a long time without speaking, appreciating his pur- 
pose. It seemed more monstrous the closer he considered 
it: natural enough withal, and so, harder to defeat; and 
yet, he was sure, that defeated it must be. He reflected 
how accidental it had all been: their presence there, in 
Ploumariel, and the rest! Touring in Brittany, as they 
had often done before, in their habit of old friends, they 
had fallen upon it by chance, a place unknown of Mur- 
ray; and the merest chance had held them there. They 
had slept at the Lion d y Or, voted it magnificently pictur- 
esque, and would have gone away and forgotten it; but 
the chance of travel had Tor once defeated them. Hard 
by they heard of the little votive chapel of Saint Bernard; 
at the suggestion of their hostess they set off to visit it. 
It was built steeply on an edge of rock, amongst odorous 
pines overhanging a ravine, at the bottom of which they 
could discern a brown torrent purling tumidly along. 

(155) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

For the convenience of devotees, iron rings, at short in- 
tervals, were driven into the wall; holding desperately 
to these, the pious pilgrim, at some peril, might compass 
the circuit; saying an oraison to Saint Bernard, and 
some ten Aves. Sebastian, who was charmed with the 
wild beauty of the scene, in a country ordinarily so 
placid, had been seized with a fit of emulation: not in any 
mood of devotion, but for the sake of a wider prospect. 
Tregellan had protested: and the Saint, resenting the 
purely aesthetic motive of the feat, had seemed to inter- 
vene. For, half-way round, growing giddy may be, the 
artist had made a false step, lost his hold. Tregellan, 
with a little cry of horror, saw him disappear amidst 
crumbling mortar and uprooted ferns. It was with a 
sensible relief, for the fall had the illusion of great depth, 
that, making his way rapidly down a winding path, he 
found him lying on a grass terrace, amidst debris twenty 
feet lower, cursing his folly, and holding a lamentably 
sprained ankle, but for the rest uninjured! Tregellan 
had made off in haste to Ploumariel in search of assist- 
ance; and within the hour he had returned with two 
stalwart Bretons and M. le Docteur Mitouard. 

Their tour had been, naturally, drawing to its close. 
Tregellan indeed had an imperative need to be in Lon- 
don within the week. It seemed, therefore, a clear; 
dispensation of Providence, that the amiable doctor 
should prove an hospitable person, and one inspiring 
confidence no less. Caring greatly for things foreign, 
and with an especial passion for England, a country 
whence his brother had brought back a wife; M. le Doc- 
teur Mitouard insisted that the invalid could be cared for 
properly at his house alone. And there, in spite of pro- 
testations, earnest from Sebastian, from Tregellan half- 
hearted, he was installed. And there, two days later, 

(156) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

Tregellan left him with an easy mind ; bearing away with. 
him, half enviously, the recollection of the young, charm- 
ing face of a girl, the Doctor's niece, as he had seen her 
standing by his friend's sofa when he paid his adieux; 
in the beginnings of an intimacy, in which, as he foresaw, 
the petulance of the invalid, his impatience at an en- 
forced detention, might be considerably forgot. And all 
that had been two months ago. 



II 



'I am sorry you don't see it,' continued Tregellan, after 
a pause, 'to me it seems impossible; considering your his- 
tory it takes me by surprise.' 

The other frowned slightly ; finding this persistence 
perhaps a trifle crude, he remarked good-humouredl}r 
enough: 

'Will you be good enough to explain your opposition? 
Do you object to the girl? You have been back a week 
now, during which you have seen almost as much of her 
as I.' 

'She is a child, to begin with; there is five-and-twenty 
years' disparity between you. But it's the relation I ob- 
ject to, not the girl. Do you intend to live in Plou- 
mariel?' 

Sebastian smiled, with a suggestion of irony. 

'Not precisely; I think it would interfere a little with 
my career; why do you ask?' 

'I imagined not; you will go back to London with your 
little Breton wife, who is as charming here as the apple- 
blossom in her own garden. You will introduce her to 
your circle, who will receive her with open arms; all 
the clever bores, who write, and talk, and paint, and are 

dS7) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

talked about between Bloomsbury and Kensington 
Everybody who is emancipated will know her, and every 
body who has a "fad"; and they will come in a body anc 
emancipate her, and teach her their "fads." ' 

'That is a caricature of my circle, as you call it, Tre 
gellan! though I may remind you it is also yours, 
think she is being starved in this corner, spiritually. She 
has a beautiful soul, and it has had no chance. I pro- 
pose to give it one, and I am not afraid of the result.' 

Tregellan threw away the stump of his cigar into the 
darkling street, with a little gesture of discouragement 
of lassitude. 

'She has had the chance to become what she is, a per- 
fect thing.' 

'My dear fellow/ exclaimed his friend, 'I could not 
have said more myself.' 

The other continued, ignoring his interruption. 

'She has had great luck. She has been brought up by 
an old eccentric, on the English system of growing up 
she liked. And no harm has come of it, at least until 
gave you the occasion of making love to her.' 

'You are candid, Tregellan!' 

'Let her go, Sebastian, let her go,' he continued, with 
increasing gravity. 'Consider what a transplantation 
from this world of Ploumariel where everything is fixec 
for her by that venerable old Cure, where life is so easy 
so ordered, to yours, ours; a world without definitions, 
where everything is an open question.' 

'Exactly,' said the artist, 'why should she be so lim- 
ited? I would give her scope, ideas. I can't see that '. 
am wrong.' 

'She will not accept them, your ideas. They wil 
trouble her, terrify her; in the end, divide you. It 
not an elastic nature. I have watched it.' 

(iS8) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

'At least, allow me to know her,' put in the artist, 
a little grimly. 

Tregellan shook his head. 

'The Breton blood; her English mother: passionate 
Catholicism! a touch of Puritan! Have you quite made 
up your mind, Sebastian?' 

'I made it up long ago, Tregellan!' 

The other looked at him, curiously, compassionately; 
with a touch of resentment at what he found his lack of 
subtil ty. Then he said at last: 

'I called it impossible; you force me to be very ex- 
plicit, even cruel. I must remind you, that you are, of 
all my friends, the one I value most, could least afford to 
lose.' 

'You must be going to say something extremely dis- 
agreeable! something horrible,' said the artist, slowly. 

'I am,' said Tregellan, 'but I must say it. Have you 
explained to Mademoiselle, or her uncle, your — your pe- 
culiar position?' 

Sebastian was silent for a moment, frowning: the lines 
about his mouth grew a little sterner; at last he said 
coldly: 

'If I were to answer, Yes?' 

'Then I should understand that there was no further 
question of your marriage.' 

Presently the other commenced in a hard, leaden 
voice. 

'No, I have not told Marie- Yvonne that. I shall not 
tell her. I have suffered enough for a youthful folly; 
an act of mad generosity. I refuse to allow an infa- 
mous woman to wreck my future life as she has disgraced 
my past. Legally, she has passed out of it; morally, 
legally, she is not my wife. For all I know she may be 
actually dead.' 

(159) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

The other was watching his face, very gray and old 
now, with an anxious compassion. 

'You know she is not dead, Sebastian,' he said simply. 
Then he added very quietly as one breaks supreme bad 
tidings, 'I must tell you something which I fear you have 
not realised. The Catholic Church does not recognise 
divorce. If she marry you and find out, rightly or 
wrongly, she will believe that she has been living in sin; 
some day she will find it out. No damnable secret like 
that keeps itself for ever: an old newspaper, a chance 
remark from one of your dear friends, and the deluge. 
Do you see the tragedy, the misery of it? By God, Se- 
bastian, to save you both somebody shall tell her; and 
if it be not you, it must be I.' 

There was extremest peace in the quiet square; the 
houses seemed sleepy at last, after a day of exhausting 
tranquillity, and the chestnuts, under which a few chil- 
dren, with tangled hair and fair dirty faces, still playe< 
The last glow of the sun fell on the gray roofs opposite 
dying hard it seemed over the street in which the Mit- 
ouards lived; and they heard suddenly the tinkle of ai 
Angelus bell. Very placid I the place and the few peas- 
ants in their pictorial hats and caps who lingered. Onl; 
the two Englishmen sitting, their glasses empty, an< 
their smoking over, looking out on it all with their an: 
ious faces, brought in a contrasting note of moden 
life; of the complex aching life of cities, with its troubL 
and its difficulties. 

'Is that your final word, Tregellan?' asked the artist 
at last, a little wearily. 

'It must be, Sebastian! Believe me, I am infinitely 
sorry.' 

'Yes, of course/ he answered quickly, acidly; 'well, I 
will sleep on it.' 

(160) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 



III 

They made their first breakfast in an almost total 
silence; both wore the bruised harassed air which tells 
of a night passed without benefit of sleep. Immediately 
afterwards Murch went out alone: Tregellan could guess 
the direction of his visit, but not its object; he won- 
dered if the artist was making his difficult confession. 
Presently they brought him in a pencilled note; he recog- 
nised, with some surprise, his friend's tortuous hand. 

'I have considered our conversation, and your unjusti- 
fiable interference. I am entirely in your hands: at the 
mercy of your extraordinary notions of duty. Tell her 
what you will, if you must; and pave the way to your 
own success. I shall say nothing; but I swear you love 
the girl yourself; and are no right arbiter here. Sebas- 
tian Murch.' 

He read the note through twice before he grasped its 
purport; then sat holding it in lax fingers, his face 
grown singularly gray. 

'It's not true, it's not true,' he cried aloud, but a 
moment later knew himself for a self-deceiver all along. 
Never had self-consciousness been mere sudden, unex- 
pected, or complete. There was no more to do or say; 
this knowledge tied his hands. He! missa est! . . . 

He spent an hour painfully invoking casuistry, tossed 
to and fro irresolutely, but never for a moment disput- 
ing that plain fact which Sebastian had so brutally illu- 
minated. Yes! he loved her, had loved her all along. 
Marie- Yvonne! how the name expressed her! at once 
sweet and serious, arch and sad as her nature. The little 
Breton wild flower! how cruel it seemed to gather her! 
And he could do no more; Sebastian had tied his hands. 
Things must be! He was a man nicely conscientious, 

(161) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

and now all the elaborate devices of his honour, which 
had persuaded him to a disagreeable interference, were 
contraposed against him. This suspicion of an ulterior 
motive had altered it, and so at last he was left to decide 
with a sigh, that because he loved these two so well, he 
must let them go their own way to misery. 

Coming in later in the day, Sebastian Murch found his 
friend packing. 

'I have come to get your answer,' he said; 'I have 
been walking about the hills like a madman for hours. I 
have not been near her; I am afraid. Tell me what you 
mean to do?' 

Tregellan rose, shrugged his shoulders, pointed to his 
valise. 

'God help you both! I would have saved you if 
you had let me. The Quimperle Counter passes in half- 
an-hour. I am going by it. I shall catch a night train to 
Paris.' 

As Sebastian said nothing; continued to regard him 
with the same dull, anxious gaze, he went on after a 
moment: 

'You did me a grave injustice; you should have known 
me better than that. God knows I meant nothing shame- 
ful, only the best; the least misery for you and her.' 

'It was true then?' said Sebastian, curiously. His 
voice was very cold; Tregellan found him altered. He 
regarded the thing as it had been very remote, and out- 
side them both. 

'I did not know it then,' said Tregellan, shortly. 

He knelt down again and resumed his packing. Se- 
bastian, leaning against the bed, watched him with ab- 
sent intensity, which was yet alive to trivial things, and 
he handed him from time to time a book, a brush, which 
the other packed mechanically with elaborate care. There 
was no more to say, and Dresently, when the chamber- 

(162) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

maid entered for his luggage, they went down and out 
into the splendid sunshine, silently. They had to cross 
the Square to reach the carriage, a dusty ancient vehicle, 
hooded, with places for four, which waited outside the 
postoffice. A man in a blue blouse preceded them, car- 
rying Tregellan's things. From the corner they could 
look down the road to Quimperle, and their eyes both 
sought the white house of Doctor Mitouard, standing 
back a little in its trim garden, with its one incongruous 
apple tree; but there was no one visible. 

Presently, Sebastian asked, suddenly: 

'Is it true, that you said last night: divorce to a Cath- 
olic—?' 

Tregellan interrupted him. 

'It is absolutely true, my poor friend/ 

He had climbed into his place at the back, settled him- 
self on the shiny leather cushion: he appeared to be the 
only passenger. Sebastian stood looking drearily in at 
the window, the glass of which had long perished. 

'I wish I had never known, Tregellan! How could 
I ever tell her!' 

Inside, Tregellan shrugged his shoulders: not impa- 
tiently, or angrily, but in sheer impotence; as one who 
gave it up. 

'I can't help you/ he said, 'you must arrange it with 
your own conscience.' 

'Ah, it's too difficult!' cried the other: 'I can't find 
my way.' 

The driver cracked his whip, suggestively; Sebastian 
drew back a little further from the off wheel. 

'Well,' said the other, 'if you find it, write and tell 
me. I am very sorry, Sebastian.' 

'Good-bye,' he replied. 'Yes! I will write.' 

The carriage lumbered off, with a lurch to the right, 
as it turned the corner; it rattled down the hill, raising 

(163) 



A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 

a cloud of white dust. As it passed the Mitouards' house, 
a young girl, in a large straw hat, came down the gar- 
den, too late to discover whom it contained. She 
watched it out of sight, indifferently, leaning on the little 
iron gate; then she turned, to recognize the long stoop- 
ing figure of Sebastian Murch, who advanced to meet 
her. 



(i6 4 ) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 



At my dining-place in old Soho — I call it mine because 
there was a time when I became somewhat inveterate 
there, keeping my napkin (changed once a week) in a 
ring recognisable by myself and the waiter, my bottle 
of Beaune (replenished more frequently), and my ac- 
customed seat — at this restaurant of mine, with its con- 
fusion of tongues, its various, foreign clientele, amid all 
the coming and going, the nightly change of faces, there 
were some which remained the same, persons with whom, 
though one might never have spoken, one had neverthe- 
less from the mere continuity of juxtaposition a certain 
sense of intimacy. 

There was one old gentleman in particular, as inveter- 
ate as myself, who especially aroused my interest. A 
courteous, punctual, mild old man with an air which 
deprecated notice; who conversed each evening for a 
minute or two with the proprietor, as he rolled, always at 
the same hour, a valedictory cigarette, in a language that 
arrested my ear by its strangeness; and which proved 
to be his own, Hungarian ; who addressed a brief remark 
to me at times, half apologetically, in the precisest of 
English. We sat next each other at the same table, came 
and went at much the same hour ; and for a long while our 
intercourse was restricted to formal courtesies; mutual 
inquiries after each other's health, a few urbane stric- 
tures on the climate. The little old gentleman in spite 
of his aspect of shabby gentility, — for his coat was sadly 

(165) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

inefficient, and tlie nap of his carefully brushed hat did 
not indicate prosperity — perhaps even because of this 
suggestion of fallen fortunes, bore himself with pathetic 
erectness, almost haughtily. He did not seem amenable 
to advances. It was a long time before I knew him well 
enough to value rightly this appearance, the timid de- 
fences, behind which a very shy and delicate nature took 
refuge from the world's coarse curiosity. I can smile now, 
with a certain sadness, when I remind myself that at 
one time I was somewhat in awe of M. Maurice Cristich 
and his little air of proud humility. Now that his place 
in that dim, foreign eating-house knows him no more, and 
his yellow napkin-ring, with its distinguishing number, 
has been passed on to some other customer; I have it in 
my mind to set down my impressions of him, the short 
history of our acquaintance. It began Vvith an exchange 
of cards; a form to which he evidently attached a cere- 
monial value, for after that piece of ritual his manner 
underwent a sensible softening, and he showed by 
many subtile indefinable shades in his courteous 
address, that he did me the honour of including me in his 
friendship. I have his card before me now; a large, 
oblong piece of pasteboard, with M. Maurice Cristich, 
Theatre Royal, inscribed upon it, amid many florid flour- 
ishes. It enabled me to form my first definite notion of 
his calling, upon which I had previously wasted much 
conjecture; though I had all along, and rightly as it ap- 
peared, associated him in some manner with music. 

In time he was good enough to inform me further. He 
was a musician, a violinist; and formerly, and in his 
own country, he had been a composer. But whether for 
some lack in him of original talent, or of patience, 
whether for some grossness in the public taste, on which 
the nervous delicacy and refinement of his execution was 
lost, he had not continued. He had been driven by 

(166) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

poverty to London, had given lessons, and then for 
many years had played a second violin in the orchestra 
of the Opera. 

'It is not much, Monsieur!' he observed, deprecatingly, 
smoothing his hat with the cuff of his frayed coat-sleeve. 
'But it is sufficient; and I prefer it to teaching. In ef- 
fect, they are very charming, the seraphic young girls of 
your country! But they seem to care little for music; 
and I am a difficult master, and have not enough pa- 
tience. Once, you see, a long time ago, I had a perfect 
pupil, and perhaps that spoilt me. Yes! I prefer the 
theatre, though it is less profitable. It is not as it once 
was,' he added, with a half sigh; 'I am no longer am- 
bitious. Yes, Monsieur, when I was young, I was am- 
bitious. I wrote a symphony and several concertos. I 
even brought out at Vienna an opera, which I thought 
would make me famous; but the good folk of Vienna 
did not appreciate me, and they would have none of my 
music. They said it was antiquated, my opera, and 
absurd; and yet, it seemed to me good. I think that 
Gluck, that great genius, would have liked it; and that 
is what I should have wished. Ah! how long ago it 
seems, that time when I was ambitious! But you must 
excuse me, Monsieur! your good company makes me 
garrulous. I must be at the theatre. If I am not in 
my place at the half-hour, they fine me two shillings and 
sixpence, and that I can ill afford, you know, Monsieur!' 

In spite of his defeats, his long and ineffectual struggle 
with adversity, M. Cristich, I discovered, as our ac- 
quaintance ripened, had none of the spleen and little of 
the vanity of the unsuccessful artist. He seemed in his 
forlorn old age to have accepted his discomfiture with 
touching resignation, having acquired neither cynicism 
nor indifference. He was simply an innocent old man, in 
love with his violin and with his art, who had acqui- 

(167) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

esced in disappointment; and it was impossible to de- 
cide, whether he even believed in his talent, or had not 
silently accredited the verdict of musical Vienna, which 
iad condemned his opera in those days when he was 
ambitious. The precariousness of the London Opera was 
the one fact which I ever knew to excite him to expres- 
sions of personal resentment. When its doors were 
closed, his hard poverty (it was the only occasion when 
he protested against it), drove him, with his dear instru- 
ment and his accomplished fingers, into the orchestras of 
lighter houses, where he was compelled to play music 
which he despised. He grew silent and rueful during 
these periods of irksome servitude, rolled innumerable 
cigarettes, which he smoked with fierceness and great 
rapidity. When dinner was done, he was often volubly 
indignant, in Hungarian, to the proprietor. But with 
the beginning of the season his mood lightened. He bore 
himself more sprucely, and would leave me, to assist at 
a representation of Don Giovanni, or Tannhauser, with 
a face which was almost radiant. I had known him a 
year before it struck me that I should like to see him in 
his professional capacity. I told him of my desire a 
little diffidently, not knowing how my purpose might 
strike him. He responded graciously, but with an air 
of intrigue, laying a gentle hand upon my coat sleeve and 
bidding me wait. A day or two later, as we sat over our 
coffee, M. Cristich with an hesitating urbanity offered 
me an order. 

Tf you would do me the honour to accept it, Mon- 
sieur! It is a stall, and a good one! I have never asked 
for one before, all these years, so they gave it to me 
easily. You see, I have few friends. It is for to-mor- 
row, as you observe, I demanded it especially; it is an 
occasion of great interest to me, — ah! an occasion! You 
will come?' 

(168) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

'You are too good, M. Cristich!' I said with genuine 
gratitude, for indeed the gift came in season, the opera 
being at that time a luxury I could seldom command, 
'Need I say that I shall be delighted? And to hear 
Madame Romanoff, a chance one has so seldom!' 

The old gentleman's mild, dull eyes glistened. 'Ma- 
dame Romanoff!' he repeated, 'the marvellous Leonora! 
yes, yes! She has sung only once before in London. 
Ah, when I remember — ' He broke off suddenly. As 
he rose, and prepared for departure, he held my hand a 
little longer than usual, giving it a more intimate pres- 
sure. 

'My dear young friend, will you think me a presump- 
tuous old man, if I ask you to come and see me to- 
morrow in my apartment, when it is over? I will give 
you a glass of whisky, and we will smoke pipes, and 
you shall tell me your impressions — and then I will tell 
you why to-morrow I shall be so proud, why I show this 
emotion.' 

II 

The Opera was Fidelio, that stately, splendid work ? 
whose melody, if one may make a pictorial comparison, 
has something of that rich and sun-warm colour which, 
certainly, on the canvasses of Rubens, affects one as an 
almost musical quality. It offered brilliant opportunities, 
and the incomparable singer had wasted none of them. 
So that when, at last, I pushed my way out of the crowd- 
ed house and joined M. Cristich at the stage door, where 
he waited with eyes full of expectancy, the music still lin- 
gered about me, like the faint, past fragrance of incense, 
and I had no need to speak my thanks. He rested a 
light hand on my arm, and we walked towards his lodg- 
ing silently; the musician carrying his instrument in its 
sombre case, and shivering from time to time, a tribute 

(i6 9 ) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

to the keen spring night. He stooped as he walked, his 
eyes trailing the ground; and a certain listlessness in his 
manner struck me a little strangely, as though he came 
fresh from some solemn or hieratic experience, of which 
the reaction had already begun to set in tediously, leav- 
ing him at the last unstrung and jaded, a little weary, 
of himself and the too strenuous occasion. It was not 
until we had crossed the threshold of a dingy, high 
house in a byway of Bloomsbury, and he had ushered me, 
with apologies, into his shabby room, near the sky, that 
the sense of his hospitable duties seemed to renovate him. 
He produced tumblers from an obscure recess behind his 
bed; set a kettle on the fire, a lodging-house fire, which 
scarcely smouldered with flickers of depressing, sulphur- 
ous flame, talking of indifferent subjects, as he watched 
for it to boil. 

Only when v/e had settled ourselves, in uneasy chairs, 
opposite each other, and he had composed me, what he 
termed 'a grog': himself preferring the more innocent 
mixture known as eau sucree, did he allude to Fidelio. 
I praised heartily the discipline of the orchestra, the 
prima donna, whom report made his country-woman, 
with her strong, sweet voice and her extraordinary 
beauty, the magnificence of the music, the fine impres- 
sion of the whole. 

M. Cristich, his glass in hand, nodded approval. He 
looked intently into the fire, which cast mocking shadows 
over his quaint, incongruous figure, his antiquated dress 
coat, which seemed to skimp him, his frost-bitten coun- 
tenance, his cropped grey hair. 'Yes,' he said, 'Yes! 
So it pleased you, and you thought her beautiful? I am 
glad.' 

He turned round to me abruptly, and laid a thin hand 
impressively on my knee. 

'You know I invented her, the Romanoff, discovered 
(170) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

her, taught her all she learnt. Yes, Monsieur, I was 
proud to-night, very proud, to be there, playing for her, 
though she did not know. Ah! the beautiful creature! 
. . . and how badly I played! execrably! You could 
not notice that, Monsieur, but they did, my confreres, 
and could not understand. How should they? How 
should they dream, that I, Maurice Cristich, second vio- 
lin in the orchestra of the opera, had to do with the 
Leonora; even I! Her voice thrilled them; ah, but it 
was I who taught her her notes! They praised her dia- 
monds; yes, but once I gave her that she wanted more 
than diamonds, bread, and lodging and love. Beautiful 
they called her; she was beautiful too, when I carried 
her in my arms through Vienna. I am an old man now, 
and good for very little ; and there have been days, God 
forgive me! when I have been angry with her; but it 
was not to-night. To see her there, so beautiful and 
so great; and to feel that after all I had a hand in it, 
that I invented her. Yes, yes! I had my victory to- 
night too; though it was so private; a secret between you 
and me, Monsieur? Is it not?' 

I assured him of my discretion, but he hardly seemed 
to hear. His sad eyes had wandered away to the live 
coals, and he considered them pensively, as though he 
found them full of charming memories. I sat back, 
respecting his remoteness; but my silence was replete 
with surprised conjecture, and indeed the quaint figure of 
the old musician, every line of his garments redolent of 
ill success, had become to me, of a sudden, strangely 
romantic. Destiny, so amorous of surprises, of pathetic 
or cynical contrasts, had in this instance excelled herself. 
My obscure acquaintance, Maurice Cristich! The re- 
nowned Romanoff! Her name and acknowledged genius 
had been often in men's mouths of late, a certain lumi- 
nous, scarcely sacred, glamour attaching to it, in an 

(17O 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

hundred idle stories, due perhaps as much to the wonder 
of her sorrowful beauty, as to any justification in knowl- 
edge, of her boundless extravagance, her magnificent fan- 
tasies, her various perversity, rumour pointing specially 
at those priceless diamonds, the favours not altogether 
gratuitous it was said of exalted personages. And with 
all deductions made, for malice, for the ingenuity of the 
curious, the impression of her perversity was left; she 
remained enigmatical and notorious, a somewhat scan- 
dalous heroine! And Cristich had known her; he had, as 
he declared, and his accent was not that of bragadoccio, 
invented her. The conjuncture puzzled and fascinated 
me. It did not make Cristich less interesting, nor the 
prima-donna more perspicuous. 

By-and-by the violinist looked up at me; he smiled 
with a little dazed air, as though his thoughts had been 
a far journey. 

'Pardon me, Monsieur! I beg you to fill your glass. 
I seem a poor host; but to tell you the truth, I was 
dreaming; I was quite away, quite away.' 

He threw out his hands, with a vague expansive ges- 
ture. 

'Dear child V he said to the flames, in French; 'good 
little one! I do not forget thee.' And he began to tell 
me. 

'It was when I was at Vienna, ah! a long while ago. 
I was not rich, but neither was I very poor; I still had 

my little patrimony, and I lived in the Strasse, very 

economically; it is a quarter which many artists fre- 
quent. I husbanded my resources, that I might be able 
to work away at my art without the tedium of making it 
a means of livelihood. I refused many offers to play in 
public, that I might have more leisure. I should not do 
that now; but then, I was very confident; I had great 
faith in me. And I worked very hard at my symphony, 

(172) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

and I was full of desire to write an opera. It was a tall 
dark house, where I lived; there were many other lodg- 
ers, but I knew scarcely any of them. I went about 
with my head full of music and I had my violin ; I had 
no time to seek acquaintance. Only my neighbour, at 
the other side of my passage, I knew slightly and bowed 
to him when we met on the stairs. He was a dark, lean 
man, of a very distinguished air; he must have lived very 
hard, he had death in his face. He was not an artist, 
like the rest of us: I suspect he was a great profligate, 
and a gambler; but he had the manners of a gentleman. 
And when I came to talk to him, he displayed the great- 
est knowledge of music that I have ever known. And 
it was the same with all; he talked divinely, of every- 
thing in the world, but very wildly and bitterly. He 
seemed to have been everywhere, and done everything; 
and at last to be tired of it all; and of himself the most. 
From the people of the house I heard that he was a 
Pole; noble, and very poor; and, what surprised me, that 
he had a daughter with him, a little girl. I used to pity 
this child, who must have lived quite alone. For the 
Count was always out, and the child never appeared with 
him; and, for the rest, with his black spleen and tem- 
pers, he must have been but sorry company for a little 
girl. I wished much to see her, for you see, Monsieur! 
I am fond of children, almost as much as of music; and 
one day it came about. I was at home with my violin; 
I had been playing all the evening some songs I had 
made ; and once or twice I had seemed to be interrupted 
by little, tedious sounds. At last I stopped, and opened 
the door; and there, crouching down, I found the most 
beautiful little creature I had ever seen in my life. 
It was the child of my neighbour. Yes, Monsieur! you 
divine, you divine! That was the Leonora!' 
'And she is not your compatriot/ I asked. 
(17.O 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

'A Hungarian? ah, no! yet every piece of her pure 
Slav. But I weary you, Monsieur; I make a long story.' 

I protested my interest; and after a little side glance 
of dubious scrutiny, he continued in a constrained mono- 
tone, as one who told over to himself some rosary of 
sad enchanting memories. 

'Ah, yes! she was beautiful; that mysterious, sad Slav- 
onic beauty! a thing quite special and apart. And, as 
a child, it was more tragical and strange; that dusky 
hair! those profound and luminous eyes! seeming to 
mourn over tragedies they have never known. A strange, 
wild, silent child! She might have been eight or nine, 
then; but her little soul was hungry for music. It was 
a veritable passion; and when she became at last my 
good friend, she told me how often she had lain for 
long hours outside my door, listening to my violin. I 
gave her a kind of scolding, such as one could to 
so beautiful a little creature, for the passage was 
draughty and cold, and sent her away with some bon- 
bons. She shook back her long, dark hair: 'You are not 
angry, and I am not naughty,' she said: 'and I shall 
come back. I thank you for your bon-bons; but I 
like your music better than bon-bons, or fairy tales, or 
anything in the world.' 

'But she never came back to the passage again, Mon- 
sieur! The next time I came across the Count, I sent 
her. an invitation, a little diffidently, for he had never 
spoken to me of her, and he was a strange and difficult 
man. Now, he simply shrugged his shoulders, with a 
smile, in which, for once, there seemed more entertain- 
ment than malice. The child could visit me when she 
chose; if it amused either of us, so much the better. And 
we were content, and she came to me often; after a while, 
indeed, she was with me almost always. Child as she 
was, she had already the promise of her magnificent 

(i74) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

voice; and I taught her to use it, to sing, and to play on 
the piano and on the violin, to which she took the 
most readily. She was like a singing bird in the room, 
such pure, clear notes! And she grew very fond of me; 
she would fall asleep at last in my arms, and so stay 
until the Count would take her with him when he en- 
tered, long after midnight. He came to me naturally 
for her soon; and they never seemed long those hours 
that I watched over her sleep. I never knew him harsh 
or unkind to the child; he seemed simply indifferent to 
her as to everything else. He had exhausted life and 
he hated it; and he knew that death was on him, and he 
hated that even more. And yet he was careful of her 
after a fashion, buying her bon-bons and little costumes, 
when he was in the vein, pitching his voice softly when 
he would stay and talk to me, as though he relished her 
sleep. One night he did not come to fetch her at all, 
I had wrapped a blanket round the child where she 
lay on my bed, and had sat down to watch by her and 
presently I too fell asleep. I do not know how long 
I slept but when I woke there was a gray light in the 
room, I was very cold and stiff, but I could hear close 
by, the soft, regular breathing of the child. There was 
a great uneasiness on me, and after a while I stole out 
across the passage and knocked at the Count's door, 
there was no answer but it gave when I tried it, and 
so I went in. The lamp had smouldered out, there 
was a sick odour of petrol everywhere, and the shutters 
were closed: but through the chinks the merciless gray 
dawn streamed in and showed me the Count sitting very 
still by the table. His face wore a most curious smile, 
and had not his great cavernous eyes been open, I should 
have believed him asleep: suddenly it came to me that he 
was dead. He was not a good man, monsieur, nor an 
amiable, but a true virtuoso and full of information, and 

(i7S) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

I grieved. I have had Masses said for the repose of his 
soul.' 

He paid a tribute of silence to the dead man's mem- 
ory, and then he went on. 

'It seemed quite natural that I should take his child. 
There was no one to care, no one to object; it hap- 
pened quite easily. We went, the little one and I, to 
another part of the city. We made quite a new life. 
Oh! my God! it is a very long time ago.' 

Quite suddenly his voice went tremulous; but after 
a pause, hardly perceptible, he recovered himself and 
continued with an accent of apology. 

*I am a foolish old man, and very garrulous. It is 
not good to think of that, nor to talk of it; I do not 
know why I do. But what would you have? She loved 
me then, and she had the voice and the disposition of an 
angel. I have never been very happy. I think some- 
times, monsieur, that we others, who care much for art, 
are not permitted that. But certainly those few, rapid 
days, when she was a child, were good ; and yet they were 
the days of my defeat. I found myself out then. I was 
never to be a great artist, a maestro: a second-rate man, 
a good music-teacher for young ladies, a capable per- 
former in an orchestra, what you will, but a great artist, 
never! Yet in those days, even when my opera failed, I 
had consolation, I could say, I have a child! I would 
have kept her with me always but it could not be, from 
the very first she would be a singer. I knew always that 
a day would come when she would not need me, she was 
meant to be the world's delight, and I had no right to 
keep her, even if I could. I held my beautiful, strange 
bird in her cage, until she beat her wings against the 
bars, then I opened the door. At the last, I think, that 
is all we can do for our children, our best beloved, our 
very heart-strings, stand free of them, let them go. The 

(176) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

world is very weary, but we must all find that out for 
ourselves, perhaps when they are tired they will come 
home, perhaps not, perhaps not. It was to the Con- 
servatoire, at Milan, that I sent her finally, and it was 
at La Scala that she afterwards appeared, and at La 
Scala too, goor child, she met her evil genius, the man 
named Romanoff, a baritone in her company, own son 
of the devil, whom she married. Ah, if I could have pre- 
vented it, if I could have prevented it!' 

He lapsed into a long silence ; a great weariness seemed 
to have come over him, and in the gray light which fil- 
tered in through the dingy window blinds, his face was 
pinched and wasted, unutterably old and forlorn. 

'But I did not prevent it,' he said at last, 'for all my 
good will, perhaps merely hastened it by unseasonable 
interference. And so we went in different ways, with 
anger I fear, and at least with sore hearts and misunder- 
standing.' 

He spoke with an accent of finality, and so sadly that 
in a sudden rush of pity I was moved to protest. 

'But, surely you meet sometimes; surely this woman, 
who was as your own child—' 

He stopped me with a solemn, appealing gesture. 

'You are young, and you do not altogether under- 
stand. You must not judge her; you must not believe, 
that she forgets, that she does not care. Only, it is 
better like this, because it could never be as before. I 
could not help her. I want nothing that she can give 
me, no not anything; I have my memories! I hear of 
her, from time to time; I hear what the world says of 
her, the imbecile world, and I smile. Do I not know 
best? I, who carried her in my arms, when she was 
that high!' 

And in effect the old violinist smiled, it was as though 
he had surprised my secret of dissatisfaction, and found 

(i77) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

it, like the malice of the world, too ignorant to resent. 
The edge of his old, passionate adoration had remained 
bright and keen through the years; and it imparted a 
strange brilliancy to his eyes, which half convinced me, 
as presently, with a resumption of his usual air of diffi- 
dent courtesy, he ushered me out into the vague, spring 
dawn. And yet, when I had parted from him and was 
making my way somewhat wearily to my own quarters, 
my first dubious impression remained. My imagina- 
tion was busy with the story I had heard, striving quite 
vainly to supply omissions, to fill in meagre outlines. 
Yes! quite vainly! the figure of the Romanoff was left, 
ambiguous and unexplained; hardly acquitted in my 
mind of a certain callousness, an ingratitude almost vul- 
gar as it started out from time to time, in contraposition 
against that forlorn old age. 

Ill 

I saw him once more at the little restaurant in Soho, 
before a sudden change of fortune, calling me abroad for 
an absence, as it happened, of years, closed the habit of 
our society. He gave me the god-speed of a brother 
artist, though mine was not the way of music, with many 
prophesies of my success; and the pressure of his hand, 
as he took leave of me, was tremulous. 

'I am an old man, monsieur, and we may not meet 
again, in this world. I wish you all the chances you 
deserve in Paris; but I — I shall greatly miss you. If you 
come back in time, you will find me in the old places; 
and if not — there are things of mine, which I should 
wish you to have, that shall be sent you.' 

And indeed it proved to be our last meeting. I went 
to Paris; a fitful correspondence intervened, grew in- 
frequent, ceased ; then a little later, came to me the noti- 

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AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

fication, very brief and official, of his death in the 
French Hospital of pneumonia. It was followed by a 
few remembrances of him, sent at his request, I learnt, 
by the priest who had administered to him the last 
offices: some books that he had greatly cherished, works 
of Gliick, for the most part; an antique ivory crucifix 
of very curious workmanship; and his violin, a beautiful 
instrument dated 1670 and made at Nuremberg, yet 
with a tone which seemed to me, at least, as fine as that 
of the Cremonas. It had an intrinsic value to me, 
apart from its associations; for I too was something 
of an amateur, and since this seasoned melodious wood 
had come into my possession, I was inspired to take my 
facility more seriously. To play in public, indeed, I 
had neither leisure nor desire: but in certain salons of 
my acquaintance, where music was much in vogue, I 
made from time to time a desultory appearance. I set 
down these facts, because as it happened, this ineffectual 
talent of mine, which poor Cristich's legacy had recalled 
to life, was to procure me an interesting encounter. I 
remember the occasion well, it was too appropriate to be 
forgotten — as though my old friend's lifeless fiddle, 
which had yet survived so many maestri, was to be a 
direct instrument of the completion of his story, the res- 
urrection of those dormant and unsatisfied curiosities 
which still now and again concerned me. I had played 
at an house where I was a stranger; brought there by 
a friend, to whose insistence I had yielded somewhat 
reluctantly; although he had assured me, and, I be- 
lieve, with reason, that it was a house where the indirect, 
or Attic invitation greatly prevailed, in brief, a place 
where one met very queer people. The hostess was 
American, a charming woman, of unimpeachable antece- 
dents; but her passion for society, which, while it should 
always be interesting, was not always equally reputable^ 

(i79) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

had exposed her evenings to the suspicion of her com- 
patriots. And when I had discharged my part in the 
programme and had leisure to look around me, I saw 
at a glance that their suspicion was justified; very queer 
people indeed were there. The large hot rooms were cos- 
mopolitan: infidels and Jews, everybody and nobody; 
a scandalously promiscuous assemblage! And there, with 
a half start, which was not at first recognition, my eyes 
stopped before a face which brought to me a confused 
rush of memories. It was that of a woman who sat 
on an ottoman in the smallest room which was almost 
empty. Her companion was a small, vivacious man with 
a gray imperial, and the red ribbon in his buttonhole, 
to whose continuous stream of talk, eked out with merid- 
ional gestures, she had the air of being listlessly re- 
signed. Her dress, a marvel of discretion, its ccbur 
the yellow of old ivory, was of some very rich and stiff 
stuff cut square to her neck; that, and her great black 
hair, clustered to a crimson rose at the top of her head, 
made the pallor of her face a thing to marvel at. Her 
beauty was at once sombre and illuminating, and youth- 
ful no less. The woman of thirty: but her complexion, 
and her arms, which were bare, were soft in texture as 
a young girPs. 

I made my way as well as I could for the crowd, 
to my hostess, listened, with what patience I might, to 
some polite praise of my playing, and made my request. 

'Mrs. Destrier, I have an immense favour to ask; 
introduce me to Madame Romanoff V 

She gave me a quick, shrewd smile; then I remem- 
bered stories of her intimate quaintness. 

'My dear young man! I have no objection. Only I 
warn you, she is not conversational; you will make no 
good of it, and you will be disappointed; perhaps that 

(180) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

will be best. Please remember, I am responsible for 
nobody.' 

'Is she so dangerous?' I asked. 'But never mind; I 
believe that I have something to say which may inter- 
est her.' 

'Oh, for that!' she smiled eliptically; 'yes, she is 
most dangerous. But I will introduce you; you shall tell 
me how you succeed.' 

I bowed and smiled ; she laid a light hand on my arm ; 
and I piloted her to the desired corner. It seemed that 
the chance was with me. The little fluent Provengal had 
just vacated his seat; and when the prima-donna had 
acknowleged the hasty mention of my name, with a 
bare inclination of her head, I was emboldened to suc- 
ceed to it. And then I was silent. In the perfection of 
that dolorous face, I could not but be reminded of the 
tradition which has always ascribed something fatal and 
inevitable to the possession of great gifts: of genius or 
uncommon fortune, or singular personal beauty; and the 
common-place of conversation failed me. 

After a while she looked askance at me, with a sudden 
flash of resentment. 

'You speak no French, Monsieur! And yet you write 
it well enough; I have read your stories.' 

I acknowledged Madame's irony, permitted myself to 
hope that my efforts had met with Madame's approval. 

'A la bonne heure! I perceive you also speak it. Is 
that why you wished to be presented, to hear my criti- 
cisms?' 

'Let me answer that question when you have an- 
swered mine.' 

She glanced curiously over her feathered fan, then with 
the slightest upward inclination of her statuesque shoul- 
ders — 'I admire your books; but are your women quite 
just? I prefer your playing.' 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

That is better, Madame! It was to talk of that 1 
came.' 

'Your playing ?' 

'My violin.' 

'You want me to look at it? It is a Cremona?* 

'It is not a Cremona; but if you like, I will give it 
you.' 

Her dark eyes shone out in amazed amusement. 

'You are eccentric, Monsieur! but your nation has a 
privilege of eccentricity. At least, you amuse me; and I 
have wearied myself enough this long evening. Show me 
your violin; I am something of a virtuosa? 

I took the instrument from its case, handed it to her 
in silence, watching her gravely. She received it with 
the dexterous hands of a musician, looked at the splendid 
stains on the back, then bent over towards the light in a 
curious scrutiny of the little, faded signature of its 
maker, the fecit of an obscure Bavarian of the seven- 
teenth century; and it was a long time before she raised 
her eyes. 

When she spoke, her rich voice had a note of imperious 
entreaty in it. 'Your violin interests me, Monsieur! Oh, 
I know that wood! It came to you — ?' 

'A legacy from an esteemed friend.' 

She shot back. 'His name?' with the flash which I 
waited for. 

'Maurice Cristich, Madame!' 

We were deserted in our corner. The company had 
strayed in, one by one, to the large salon with the great 
piano, where a young Russian musician, a pupil of Cho- 
pin, sat down to play, with no conventional essay of pre- 
liminary chords, an expected morsel. The strains of it 
availed in just then, through the heavy, screening cur- 
tains; a mad valse of his own, that no human feet could 
dance to, a pitiful, passionate thing that thrilled the 

(182) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

nerves painfully, ringing the changes between voluptu- 
ous sorrow and the merriment of devils, and burdened 
always with the weariness of 'all the Russias,' the proper 
Welt-schmerz of a young, disconsolate people. It seemed 
to charge the air, like electricity, with passionate under- 
tones; it gave intimate facilities, and a tense personal 
note to our interview. 

'A legacy! so he is gone.' She swayed to me with a 
wail in her voice, in a sort of childish abandonment: 
'and you tell me! Ah!' she drew back, chilling suddenly 
with a touch of visible suspicion. 'You hurt me, Mon- 
sieur! Is it a stroke at random? You spoke of a gift; 
you say you knew, esteemed him. You were with him? 
Perhaps, a message. . .?' 

'He died alone, Madame! I have no message. If 
there were none, it might be, perhaps, that he believed 
you had not cared for it. If that were wrong, I could 
tell you that you were not forgotten. Oh! he loved 
you! I had his word for it, and the story. The violin 
is yours — do not mistake me; it is not for your sake but 
his. He died alone; value it, as I should, Madame!' 

They were insolent words, perhaps cruel, provoked 
from me by the mixed nature of my attraction to her; 
the need of turning a reasonable and cool front to that 
pathetic beauty, that artful music, which whipped jaded 
nerves to mutiny. The arrow in them struck so true, 
that I was shocked at my work. It transfixed the child 
in her, latent in most women, which moaned at my feet; 
so that for sheer shame as though it were actually a 
child I had hurt, I could have fallen and kissed her 
hands. 

'Oh, you judge me hard, you believe the worst of me 
and why not? I am against the world! At least he 
might have taught you to be generous, that kind old 
man! Have I forgotten do you think! Am I so happy 

(183) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

then? Oh it is a just question, the world busies itself 
with me, and you are in the lap of its tongues. Has it 
ever accused me of that, of happiness? Cruel, cruel! I 
have paid my penalties, and a woman is not free to do as 
she will, but would not I have gone to him, for a word, a 
sign? Yes, for the sake of my childhood. And to- 
night when you showed me that/ her white hand swept 
over the violin with something of a caress, 'I thought 
it had come, yes, from the grave, and you make it more 
bitter by readings of your own. You strike me hard.' 

I bent forward in real humility, her voice had tears 
in it, though her splendid eyes were hard. 

'Forgive me, Madame! a vulgar stroke at random. 
I had no right to make it, he told me only good of you. 
Forgive me, and for proof of your pardon — I am serious 
now — take his violin.' 

Her smile, as she refused me, was full of sad dignity. 

'You have made it impossible, Monsieur! It would 
remind me only now of how ill you think of me. I 
beg you to keep it.' 

The music had died away suddenly, and its ceasing 
had been followed by a loud murmur of applause. The 
prima-donna rose, and stood for a moment observing me, 
irresolutely. 

'I leave you and your violin, Monsieur! I have to 
sing presently, with such voice as our talk has left me. 
I bid you both adieu!' 

'Ah, Madame!' I deprecated, 'you will think again of 
this, I will send it you in the morning. I have no 
right . . .' 

She shook her head, then with a sudden flash of amuse- 
ment, or fantasy — 'I agree, Monsieur! on a condition. 
To prove your penitence, you shall bring it to me your- 
self.' 

I professed that her favour overpowered me. She 
(184) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

named an hour when she would be at home: an address 
in the Avenue des Champs Elysees, which I noted on my 
tablets. 

'Not adieu then, Monsieur! but au revolt" 

I bowed perplexedly, holding the curtain aside to let 
her sweep through; and once more she turned back, 
gathering up her voluminous train, to repeat with a 
glance and accent, which I found mystifying: l Remem- 
ber, Monsieur! It is only au revoir/ 

That last glimpse of her, with the strange mockery 
and an almost elfish malice in her fine eyes, went home 
with me later to cause vague disquiet and fresh suspi- 
cion of her truth. The spell of her extraordinary, per- 
sonal charm removed, doubt would assert itself. Was she 
quite sincere? Was her fascination not a questionable 
one? Might not that almost childish outburst of a grief 
so touching, and at the time convincing, be after all 
factitious; the movement of a born actress and enchau.nt- 
ress of men, quick to seize as by a nice professional in- 
stinct the opportunity of an effect? Had her whole atti- 
tude been a deliberate pose, a sort of trick? The sudden 
changes in her subtile voice, the under current of mock- 
ery in an invitation which seemed inconsequent, put me 
on my guard, reinforced all my deep-seated prejudices 
against the candor of the feminine soul. It left me with 
a vision of her, fantastically vivid, raccounting to an in- 
timate circle, to an accompaniment of some discreet 
laughter and the popping of champagne corks, the suc- 
cess of her imposition, the sentimental concessions which 
she had extorted from a notorious student of cynical 
moods. 

A dangerous woman! cried Mrs. Destrier with the 
world, which might conceivably be right; at least I was 
fain to add, a woman whose laughter would be merciless. 
Certainly, I had no temper f oijd^ntures ; and a visit 

(i85) 



AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN 

to Madame Romanoff on so sentimental an errand 
seemed to me, the more I pondered it, to partake of this 
quality to be rich in distasteful possibilities. Must I write 
myself pusillanimous, if I confess that I never made it, 
that I committed my old friend's violin into the hands of 
the woman who had been his pupil by the vulgar aid of 
a commissionaire? 

Pusillanimous or simply prudent; or perhaps cruelly 
unjust, to a person who had paid penalties and greatly 
needed kindness? It is a point I have never been able 
to decide, though I have tried to raise theories on the 
ground of her acquiescence. It seemed to me on the 
cards, that my fiddle bestowed so cavalierly, should be 
refused. And yet even the fact of her retaining it is 
open to two interpretations, and Cristich testified for 
her. Maurice Cristich! Madame Romanoff! the re- 
nowned Romanoff, Maurice Cristich! Have I been pusil- 
lanimous, prudent or merely cruel? For the life of 
me I cannot say! 



(186) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

Eheu fugaces ! How that air carries me back, that air 
ground away so unmercifully, sans tune, sans time on a 
hopelessly discordant barrel-organ, right underneath my 
window. It is being bitterly execrated, I know, by the 
literary gentleman who lives in chambers above me, and 
by the convivial gentleman who has a dinner party under- 
neath. It has certainly made it impossible for me to 
continue the passage in my new Fugue in A minor, which 
was being transferred so flowingly from my own brain on 
to the score when it interrupted me. But for all that, 
I have a shrewd suspicion that I shall bear its unmusical 
torture as long as it lasts, and eventually send away the 
frowsy foreigner, who no doubt is playing it, happy with 
a fairly large coin. 

Yes: for the sake of old times, for the old emotion's 
sake — for Ninette's sake, I put up with it, not altogether 
sorry for the recollections it has aroused. 

How vividly it brings it all back! Though I am a 
rich man now, and so comfortably domiciled ; though the 
fashionable world are so eager to lionise me, and the mus- 
ical world look upon me almost as a god, and to-mor- 
row hundreds of people will be turned away, for want of 
space, from the Hall where I am to play, just I alone, my 
last Fantaisie, it was not so very many years ago that 
I trudged along, fiddling for half-pence in the streets. 
Ninette and I — Ninette with her barrel-organ, and I 
fiddling. Poor little Ninette — that air was one of the 
four her organ played. I wonder what has become of 

(187) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

her? Dead, I should hope, poor child. Now that I am 
successful and famous, a Baron of the French Empire, 
it is not altogether unpleasant to think of the old, penni- 
less, vagrant days, by a blazing fire in a thick carpeted 
room, with the November night shut outside. I am 
rather an epicure of my emotions, and my work is none 
the worse for it. 

Tittle egoist/ I remember Lady Greville once said of 
me, 'he has the true artistic susceptibility. All his sen- 
sations are so much grist for his art.' 

But it is of Ninette, not Lady Greville, that I think 
to-night, Ninette's childish face that the dreary grinding 
organ brings up before me, not Lady Greville's aquiline 
nose and delicate artificial complexion. 

Although I am such a great man now, I should find 
it very awkward to be obliged to answer questions as 
to my parentage and infancy. 

Even my nationality I could not state precisely, 
though I know I am as much Italian as English, per- 
haps rather more. From Italy I have inherited my gen- 
ius and enthusiasm for art, from England I think I must 
have got my common-sense, and the capacity of keeping 
the money which I make; also a certain natural coldness 
of disposition, which those who only know me as a pub- 
lic character do not dream of. All my earliest memories 
are very vague and indistinct. I remember tramping 
over France and Italy with a man and woman — they 
were Italian, I believe — who beat me, and a fiddle, 
which I loved passionately, and which I cannot remem- 
ber having ever been without. They are very shadowy 
presences now, and the name of the man I have forgot- 
ten. The woman, I think, was called Maddalena. I am 
ignorant whether they were related to me in any way: 
I know that I hated them bitterly, and eventually, after 
a worse beating than usual, ran away from them. I 

(188) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

never cared for any one except my fiddle, until I knew 
Ninette. 

I was very hungry and miserable indeed when that 
rencontre came about. I wonder sometimes what would 
have happened if Ninette had not come to the rescue, 
just at that particular juncture. Would some other sal- 
vation have appeared, or would — well, well, if one once 
begins wondering what would have happened if certain 
accidents in one's life had not befallen one when they 
did, where will one come to a stop? Anyhow, when I had 
escaped from my taskmasters, a wretched, puny child 
of ten, undersized and shivering, clasping a cheap fiddle in 
my arms, lost in the huge labyrinth of Paris, without a 
sou in my rags to save me from starvation, I did meet 
Ninette, and that, after all, is the main point. 

It was at the close of my first day of independence, a 
wretched November evening, very much like this one. I 
had wandered about all day, but my efforts had not been 
rewarded by a single coin. My fiddle was old and 
warped, and injured by the rain; its whining was even 
more repugnant to my own sensitive ear, than to that 
of the casual passer-by. I was in despair. How I hated 
all the few well-dressed, well-to-do people who were but 
on the Boulevards, on that inclement night. I wandered 
up and down hoping against hope, until I was too tired 
to stand, and then I crawled under the shelter of a cov- 
ered passage, and flung myself down on the ground, to 
die, as I hoped, crying bitterly. 

The alley was dark and narrow, and I did not see 
at first that it had another occupant. Presently a hand 
was put out and touched me on the shoulder. 

I started up in terror, though the touch was soft and 
need not have alarmed me. I found it came from a little 
girl, for she was really about my own age, though then 
she seemed to me very big and protecting. But she was 

(189) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

tall and strong for her age, and I, as I have said, was 
weak and undersized. 

'Chut! little boy/ said Ninette; 'what are you crying 
for?' 

And I told her my story, as clearly as I could, through 
my sobs; and soon a pair of small arms were thrown 
round my neck, and a smooth little face laid against my 
wet one caressingly. I felt as if half my troubles were 
over. 

'Don't cry, little boy,' said Ninette, grandly; 'I will 
take care of you. If you like, you shall live with me. 
We will make a menage together. What is your profes- 
sion?' 

I showed her my fiddle, and the sight of its condition 
caused fresh tears to flow. 

'Ah!' she said, with a smile of approval, 'a violinist — \ 
good! I too am an artiste. You ask my instrument?, 
There it is!' 

And she pointed to an object on the ground beside her, 
which I had, at first, taken to be a big box, and dimly 
hoped might contain eatables. My respect for my new 
friend suffered a little diminution. Already I felt in- 
stinctively that to play the fiddle, even though it is an 
old, a poor one, is to be something above a mere organ- 
grinder. 

But I did not express this feeling — was not this 
little girl going to take me home with her? would 
not she, doubtless, give me something to eat? 

My first impulse was an artistic one; that was of 
Italy. The concealment of it was due to the English 
side of me — the practical side. 

I crept close to the little girl; she drew me to her 
protectingly. 

'What is thy name, p'tit?' she said. 

'Anton/ I answered, for that was what the woman 
(190) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

Maddalena had called me. Her husband. If he was her 
husband, never gave me any title, except when he was 
abusing me, and then my names were many and unmen- 
tionable. Nowadays I am the Baron Antonio Anto- 
nelli, of the Legion of Honour, but that is merely an ex- 
tension of the old concise Anton, so far as I know, the 
only name I ever had.' 

'Anton?' repeated the little girl, that is a nice name to 
say. Mine is Ninette.' 

We sat in silence in our sheltered nook, waiting until 
the rain should stop, and very soon I began to whimper 
again. 

'I am so hungry, Ninette,' I said; 'I have eaten nothing 
to-day.' 

In the literal sense this was a lie; I had eaten some 
stale crusts in the early morning, before I gave my task- 
masters the slip, but the hunger was true enough. 

Ninette began to reproach herself for not thinking of 
this before. After much fumbling in her pocket, she pro- 
duced a bit of brioche, an apple, and some cold chest- 
nuts. 

'Via, Anton,' she said, 'pop those in your mouth. 
When we get home we will have supper together. I have 
bread and milk at home. And we will buy two hot 
potatoes from the man on the quai! 

I ate the unsatisfying morsels ravenously, Ninette 
watching me with an approving nod the while. When 
they were finished, the weather was a little better, and 
Ninette said we might move. She slung the organ over 
her shoulder — it was a small organ, though heavy for a 
child; but she was used to it, and trudged along under 
its weight like a woman. With her free hand she caught 
hold of me and led me along the wet streets, proudly 
home. Ninette's home! Poor little Ninette! It was 
colder and barer than these rooms of mine now; it had 

(191) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

no grand piano, and no thick carpets; and in the place 
of pictures and bibelots, its walls were only wreathed in 
cobwebs. Still it was drier than the streets of Paris, and 
if it had been a palace it could not have been more wel- 
come to me than it was that night. 

The menage of Ninette was a strange one! There 
was a tumbledown deserted house in the Montparnasse 
district. It stood apart, in an overgrown weedy garden, 
and has long ago been pulled down. It was uninhabited; 
no one but a Parisian gamine could have lived in it, and 
Ninette had long occupied it, unmolested, save by the 
rats. Through the broken palings in the garden she had 
no difficulty in passing, and as its back door had fallen 
to pieces, there was nothing to bar her further entry. 
In one of the few rooms which had its window intact, 
right at the top of the house, a mere attic, Ninette had 
installed herself and her scanty goods, and hencefor- 
ward this became my home also. 

It has struck me since as strange that the child's pres- 
ence should not have been resented by the owner. But 
I fancy the house had some story connected with it. 
It was, I believe, the property of an old and infirm 
miser, who in his reluctance to part with any of his 
money in repairs had overreached himself, and let his 
property become valueless. He could not let it, and he 
would not pull it down. It remained therefore an eye- 
sore to the neighbourhood, until his death put it in the 
possession of a less avaricious successor. The proprie- 
tor never came near the place, and with the neighbours 
it had a bad repute, and they avoided it as much as 
possible. It stood, as I have said, alone, and in its 
own garden, and Ninette's occupation of it may have 
passed unnoticed, while even if any one of the poor peo- 
ple living around had known of her, it was, after all, 
nobody's business to interfere. 

(192) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

When I was last in Paris I went to look for the house^ 
but all traces of it had vanished, and over the site, so 
far as I could fix it, a narrow street of poor houses flour- 
ished. 

Ninette introduced me to her domain with a proud 
air of ownership. She had a little store of charcoal, 
with which she proceeded to light a fire in the grate, and 
by its fitful light prepared our common supper — bread 
and radishes, washed down by a pennyworth of milk, of 
which, I have no doubt, I received the lion's share. As 
a dessert we munched, with much relish, the steaming 
potatoes that Ninette had bought from a stall in the 
street, and had kept warm in the pocket of her apron. 

And so, as Ninette said, we made a menage together. 
How that old organ brings it all back. My fiddle was 
useless after the hard usage it received that day. Ni- 
nette and I went out on our rounds together, but for the 
present I was a sleeping partner in the firm, and all I 
could do was to grind occasionally when Ninette's arm 
ached, or pick up the sous that were thrown us. Ni- 
nette was, as a rule, fairly successful. Since her mother 
had died, a year before, leaving her the organ as her 
sole legacy, she had lived mainly by that instrument; al- 
though she often increased her income in the evenings, 
when organ-grinding was more than ever at a discount^ 
by selling bunches of violets and other flowers as but- 
ton-holes. 

With her organ she had a regular beat, and a distinct 
clientele. Children playing with their bonnes in the gar- 
dens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg were her most 
productive patrons. Of course we had bad days as well 
as good, and in winter it was especially bad; but as a 
rule we managed fairly to make both ends meet. Some- 
times we carried home as much as five francs as the 

(i93) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

result of the day's campaign, but this, of course, was un- 
usual. 

Ninette was not precisely a pretty child, but she had 
a very bright face, and wonderful gray eyes. When she 
smiled, which was often, her face was very attractive, and 
a good many people were induced to throw a sou for the 
smile which they would have assuredly grudged to the 
music. 

Though we were about the same age, the position which 
it might have been expected we should occupy was re- 
versed. It was Ninette who petted and protected me — I 
who clung to her. 

I was very fond of Ninette, certainly. I should have 
died in those days if it had not been for her, and some- 
times I am surprised at the tenacity of my tenderness 
for her. As much as I ever cared for anything except 
my art, I cared for Ninette. But still she was never the 
first with me, as I must have been with her. I was often 
fretful and discontented, sometimes, I fear, ready to 
reproach her for not taking more pains to alleviate our 
misery, but all the time of our partnership Ninette never 
gave me a cross word. There was something maternal 
about her affection, which withstood all ungratefulness. 
She was always ready to console me when I was mis- 
erable, and throw her arms round me and kiss me when 
I was cold; and many a time, I am sure, when the day's 
earnings had been scanty, the little girl must have gone 
to sleep hungry, that I might not be stinted in my sup- 
per. 

One of my grievances, and that the sorest of all, was 
the loss of my beloved fiddle. This, for all her goodwill, 
Ninette was powerless to allay. 

'Dear Anton/ she said, 'do not mmd about it. I earn 
enough for both with my organ, and some day we shall 
save enough to buy thee a new fiddle. When we are 

(i94) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

together, and have got food and charcoal, what does it 
matter about an old fiddle? Come, eat thy supper, An- 
ton, and I will light the fire. Never mind, dear Anton.' 
And she laid her soft little cheek against mine with a 
pleading look. 

'Don't/ I cried, pushing her away, 'you can't under- 
stand, Ninette; you can only grind an organ — just four 
tunes, always the same. But I loved my fiddle, loved 
it! loved it!' I cried passionately. 'It could talk to 
me, Ninette, and tell me beautiful, new things, always 
beautiful, and always new. Oh, Ninette, I shall die if 
I cannot play!' 

It was always the same cry, and Ninette, if she could 
not understand, and was secretly a little jealous, was as 
distressed as I was; but what could she do? 

Eventually, I got my violin, and it was Ninette who 
gave it me. The manner of its acquirement was in this 
wise. 

Ninette would sometimes invest some of her savings in 
violets, which she divided with me, and made into nose- 
gays for us to sell in the streets at night. 

Theatre doors and frequented placed on the Boule- 
vards were our favorite spots. 

One night we had taken up our station outside the 
Opera, when a gentleman stopped on his way in, and 
asked Ninette for a button-hole. He was in evening 
dress and in a great hurry. 

'How much?' he asked shortly. 

'Ten sous, M'sieu? said exorbitant little Ninette, ex- 
pecting to get two at the most. 

The gentleman drew out some coins hastily and se- 
lected a bunch from the basket. 

'Here is a franc/ he said, 'I cannot wait for change/ 
and putting a coin into Ninette's hand he turned into tha 
theatre. 

(i9S) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

Ninette ran towards me with her eyes gleaming; she 
held up the piece of money exultantly. 

'Tiens, Anton!' she cried, and I saw that it was not 
a franc, as we had though at first, but a gold Napoleon. 

I believe the good little boy and girl in the story-books 
would have immediately sought out the unfortunate 
gentleman and bid him rectify his mistake, generally re- 
ceiving, so the legend runs, a far larger bonus as a re- 
ward of their integrity. I have never been a particularly 
good little boy, however, and I don't think it ever struck 
either Ninette or myself — perhaps we were not suffi- 
ciently speculative — that any other course was open to 
us than to profit by the mistake. Ninette began to con- 
sider how we were to spend it. 

Think of it, Anton, a whole gold lends. A louts/ said 
Ninette, counting laboriously, 'is twenty francs, a franc 
is twenty sous, Anton; how many sous are there in a 
louis? More than an hundred ?' 

But this piece of arithmetic was beyond me; I shook 
my head dubiously. 

'What shall we buy first, Anton?' said Ninette, with 
sparkling eyes. 'You shall have new things, Anton, a 
pair of new shoes and an hat; and I — * 

But I had other things than clothes in my mind's eye; 
I interrupted her. 

'Ninette, dear little Ninette/ I said coaxingly, 'remem- 
ber the fiddle.' 

Ninette's face fell, but she was a tender little thing, 
and she showed no hesitation. 

'Certainly, Anton,' she said, but with less enthusi- 
asm, 'we will get it to-morrow — one of the fiddles you 
showed me in M. Boudinot's shop on the Quai. Do you 
think the ten-franc one will do, or the light one for fif- 
teen francs?' 

'Oh, the light one, dear Ninette,' I said; 'it is worth 
(196) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

more than the extra money. Besides, we shall soon earn 
it back now. Why if you could earn such a lot as you 
have with your old organ, when you only have to turn an 
handle, think what a lot I shall make, fiddling. For 
you have to be something to play the fiddle, Ninette.' 

'Yes/ said the little girl, wincing; 'you are right, 
dear Anton. Perhaps you will get rich and go away and 
leave me?' 

'No, Ninette,' I declared grandly, 'I will always take 
care of you. I have no doubt I shall get rich, because I 
am going to be a great musician, but I shall not leave 
you. I will have a big house on the Champs Elysees, 
and then you shall come and live with me, and be my 
housekeeper. And in the evenings, I will play to you 
and make you open your eyes, Ninette. You will like 
me to play, you know; we are often dull in the eve- 
nings.' 

'Yes,' said Ninette meekly, 'we will buy your fiddle 
to-morrow, dear Anton. Let us go home now.' 

Poor vanished Ninette! I must often have made the 
little heart sore with some of the careless things I said. 
Yet looking back at it now, I know that I never cared 
for any living person so much as I did for Ninette. 

I have very few illusions left now; a childhood, such 
as mine, does not tend to preserve them, and time and 
success have not made me less cynical. Still I have never 
let my scepticism touch that childish presence. Lady 
Greville once said to me, in the presence of her nephew 
Felix Leominster, a musician too, like myself, that we 
three were curiously suited, for that we were, without 
exception, the three most cynical persons in the universe. 
Perhaps in a way she was right. Yet for all her cyni- 
cism Lady Greville I know has a bundle of old and 
faded letters, tied up in black ribbon in some hidden 
drawer, that perhaps she never reads now, but that she 

(i97) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

cannot forget or destroy. They are in a bold hand- 
writing, that is, not, I think, that of the miserable, old 
debauchee, her husband, from whom she has been sepa- 
rated since the first year of her marriage, and their en- 
velopes bear Indian postmarks. 

And Felix, who told me the history of those letters 
with a smile of pity on his thin, ironical lips — Felix, 
whose principles are adapted to his conscience and whose 
conscience is bounded by the law, and in whom I believe 
as little as he does in me, I found out by accident not 
so very long ago. It was on the day of All Souls, the 
melancholy festival of souvenirs, celebrated once a year, 
under the November fogs, that I strayed into the 
Montparnasse Cemetery, to seek inspiration for my 
art. And though he did not see me, I saw Felix, the 
prince of railers, who believes in nothing and cares for 
nothing except himself, for music is not with him a pas- 
sion but an agrement. Felix bareheaded, and without 
his usual smile, putting fresh flowers on the grave of a 
little Parisian grisette, who had been his mistress and 
died five years ago. I thought of Balzac's 'Messe de 
l'Athee' and ranked Felix's inconsistency with it, feeling 
at the same time how natural such a paradox is. And 
myself, the last of the trio, at the mercy of a street or- 
gan, I cannot forget Ninette. 

Though it was not until many years had passed that I 
heard that little criticism, the purchase of my fiddle was 
destined very shortly to bring my life in contact with 
its author. Those were the days when a certain restraint 
grew up between Ninette and myself. Ninette, it must 
be confessed, was jealous of the fiddle. Perhaps she 
knew instinctively that music was with me a single and 
absorbing passion, from which she was excluded. She 
was no genius, little Ninette, and her organ was noth- 
ing more to her than the means of making a livelihood; 

(198) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

she felt not the smallest tendresse for it, and could not 
understand why a dead and inanimate fiddle, made of 
mere wood and catgut, should be any more to me than 
that. How could she know that to me it was never a 
dead thing, that even when it hung hopelessly out of 
my reach, in the window of M. Boudinot, before ever it 
had given out wild, impassioned music beneath my hands, 
it was always a live thing to me, alive and with a hu- 
man, throbbing heart, vibrating with hope and passion. 

So Ninette was jealous of the fiddle, and being proud 
in her way, she became more and more quiet and reti- 
cent, and drew herself aloof from me, although, wrapped 
up as I was in the double egoism of art and boyhood, I 
failed to notice this. I have been sorry since that any 
shadow of misunderstanding should have clouded the 
closing days of our partnership. It is late to regret now, 
however. When my fiddle was added to our belongings, 
we took to going out separately. It was more profitable, 
and, besides, Ninette, I think, saw that I was growing a 
little ashamed of her organ. On one of these occasions, 
as I played before a house in the Faubourg St. Germain, 
the turning point of my life befell me. The house, out- 
side which I had taken my station was a large, white 
one, with a balcony on the first floor. This balcony was 
unoccupied, but the window looking to it was open, and 
through the lace curtains I could distinguish the sound 
of voices. I began to play; at first, one of the airs that 
Maddalena had taught me; but before it was finished, 
I had glided off, as usual, into an improvisation. 

When I was playing like that, I threw all my soul into 
my fingers, and I had neither ears nor eyes for anything 
round me. I did not therefore notice until I had finished 
playing that a lady and a young man had come out into 
the balcony, and were beckoning to me. 

'Bravo!' cried the lady enthusiastically, but she did 
(i99) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

not throw me the reward I had expected. She turned 
and said something to her companion, who smiled and 
disappeared. I waited expectantly, thinking perhaps 
she had sent him for her purse. Presently the door 
opened, and the young man issued from it. He came to 
me and touched me on the shoulder. 

'You are to come with, me,' he said, authoritatively, 
speaking in French, but with an English accent. I fol- 
lowed him, my heart beating with excitement, through 
the big door, into a large, handsome hall and up a broad- 
staircase, thinking that in all my life I had never seen 
such a beautiful house. 

Fie led me into a large and luxurious salon, which 
seemed to my astonished eyes like a wonderful museum. 
The walls were crowded with pictures, a charming com- 
position by Gustave Moreau was lying on the grand pi- 
ano, waiting until a nook could be found for it to hang. 
Renaissance bronzes and the work of eighteenth century 
silversmiths jostled one another on brackets, and on a 
table lay a handsome violin-case. The pale blinds were 
drawn down, and there was a delicious smell of flowers 
diffused everywhere. A lady was lying on a sofa near 
the window, a handsome woman of about thirty, whose 
dress was a miracle of lace and flimsiness. 

The young man led me towards her, and she placed 
two delicate, jewelled hands on my shoulders, looking me 
steadily in the face. 

'Where did you learn to play like that, my boy?' she 
asked. 

T cannot remember when I could not fiddle, Ma- 
dame/ I answered, and that was true. 

'The boy is a born musician, Felix/ said Lady Gre- 
ville. 'Look at his hands.' 

And she held up mine to the young man's notice; he 
glanced at them carelessly. 

(200) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

'Yes, Miladi,' said the young man, 'they are real 
violin hands. What were you playing just now, my lad? J 

'I don't know, sir,' I said. 'I play just what comes 
into my head.' 

Lady Greville looked at her nephew with a glance of 
triumph. 

What did I tell you?' she cried. The boy is a genius, 
Felix. I shall have him educated.' 

'All your geese are swans, Auntie,' said the young man 
in English. 

Lady Greville, however, ignored this thrust. 

Will you play for me now, my dear,' she said, 'as 
you did before — just what comes into your head?' 

I nodded, and was getting my fiddle to my chin, when 
she stopped me. 

'Not that thing,' bestowing a glance of contempt at 
my instrument. 'Felix, the Stradivarius.' 

The young man went to the other side of the room, 
and returned with the case which I had noticed. He put 
it in my hand, with the injunction to handle it gently. 
I had never heard of Cremona violins, nor of my name- 
sake Stradivarius; but at the sight of the dark seasoned 
wood, reposing on its blue velvet, I could not restrain 
a cry of admiration. 

I have that same instrument in my room now, and I 
would not trust it in the hands of another for a million. 

L lifted the violin tenderly from its case, and ran my 
bow up the gamut. 

I felt almost intoxicated at the mellow sounds it ut- 
tered. I could have kissed the dark wood, that looked 
to me stained through and through with melody. 

I began to play. My improvisation was a song of 
triumph and delight; the music, at first rapid and joy- 
ous, became slower and more solemn, as the inspiration 
seized on me, until at last, in spite of myself, it grew 

(201) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

into a wild and indescribable dirge, fading away in a long 
wail of unutterable sadness and regret. When it was 
over I felt exhausted and unstrung, as though virtue had 
gone out from me. I had played as I had never played 
before. The young man had turned away, and was look- 
ing out of the window. The lady on the sofa was trans- 
figured. The languor had altogether left her, and the 
tears were streaming down her face, to the great detri- 
ment of the powder and enamel which composed her 
complexion. 

She pulled me towards her, and kissed me. 

Tt is beautiful, terrible!' she said; 'I have never heard 
such strange music in my life. You must stay with me 
now and have masters. If you can play like that now, 
without culture and education, in time, when you have 
been taught, you will be the greatest violinist that ever 
lived.' 

I will say of Lady Greville that, in spite of her frivol- 
ity and affectations, she does love music at the bottom 
of her soul, with the absorbing passion that in my eyes 
would absolve a person for committing all the sins in the 
Decalogue. If her heart could be taken out and exam- 
ined I can fancy it as a shield, divided into equal fields. 
Perhaps, as her friends declare, one of these might bear 
the device 'Modes et Confections'; but I am sure that 
you would see on the other, even more deeply graven, the 
divine word 'Music' 

She is one of the few persons whose praise of any of 
my compositions gives me real satisfaction; and almost 
alone, when everybody is running, in true goose fashion, 
to hear my piano recitals, she knows and tells me to stick 
to my true vocation — the violin. 

'My dear Baron,' she said, 'why waste your time 
playing on an instrument which is not suited to you, when 

(202) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

you have Stradivarius waiting at home for the magic 
touch?' 

She was right, though it is the fashion to speak of me 
now as a second Rubens tein. There are two or three 
finer pianists than I, even here in England. But I am 
quite sure, yes, and you are sure, too, oh my Stradi- 
varius, that in the whole world there is nobody who can 
make such music out of you as I can, no one to whom 
you tell such stories as you tell to me. Any one, who 
knows, could see by merely looking at my hands that 
they are violin and not piano hands. 

' Will you come and live with me, Anton ?' said Lady 
Greville, more calmly. 'I am rich, and childless; you 
shall live just as if you were my child. The best masters 
in Europe shall teach you. Tell me where to find your 
parents, Anton, and I will see them to-night.' 

'I have no parents,' I said, 'only Ninette. I cannot 
leave Ninette.' 

'Shade of Musset, who is Ninette?' asked Felix, turning 
round from the window. 

I told him. 

'What is to be done?' cried Lady Greville in perplexity. 
'I cannot have the girl here as well, and I will not let 
my Phoenix go.' 

'Send her to the Soeurs de la Misericorde,' said the 
young man carelessly; 'you have a nomination.' 

'Have I?' said Lady Greville, with a laugh. 'I am 
sure I did not know it. It is an excellent idea; but do 
you think he will come without the other? I suppose 
they were like brother and sister?' 

'Look at him now,' said Felix, pointing to where I 
stood caressing the precious wood; 'he would sell his 
soul for that fiddle.' 

Lady Greville took the hint. 'Here, Anton,' said she, 
'I cannot have Ninette here — you understand, once and 

(203) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

for all. But I will see that she is sent to a kind home, 
where she will want for nothing and be trained up as a 
servant. You need not bother about her. You will live 
with me and be taught, and some day, if you are good 
and behave, you shall go and see Ninette.' 

I was irresolute, but I only said doggedly, feeling 
what would be the end, 'I do not want to come, if Ninette 
may not.' 

Then Lady Greville played her trump card. 

Took, Anton,' she said, 'you see that violin. I have no 
need, I see, to tell you its value. If you will come with 
me and make no scene, you shall have it for your very 
own. Ninette will be perfectly happy. Do you agree?' 

I looked at my old fiddle, lying on the floor. How 
yellow and trashy it looked beside the grand old Cre- 
mona, bedded in its blue velvet. 

'I will do what you like, Madame,' I said. 

'Human nature is pretty much the same in geniuses 
and dullards,' said Felix. 'I congratulate you, Auntie.' 

And so the bargain was struck, and the new life en- 
tered upon that very day. Lady Greville sought out 
Ninette at once, though I was not allowed to accompany 
her. 

I never saw Ninette again. She made no opposition to 
Lady Greville 's scheme. She let herself be taken to 
the Orphanage, and she never asked, so they said, to see 
me again. 

'She's a stupid little thing,' said Lady Greville to her 
nephew, on her return, 'and as plain as possible; but I 
suppose she was kind to the boy. They will forget each 
other now I hope. It is not as if they were related.' 

'In that case they would already be hating each other. 
However, I am quite sure your protege will forget soon 
enough; and, after all, you have nothing to do with the 
girl. 5 

(204) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

I suppose I did not think very much of Ninette then; 
but what would you have? It was such a change from 
the old vagrant days, that there is a good deal to excuse 
me. I was absorbed too in the new and wonderful sym- 
metry which music began to assume, as taught me by 
the master Lady Greville procured for me. When the 
news was broken to me, with great gentleness, that my 
little companion had run away from the sisters with 
whom she had been placed — run away, and left no traces 
behind her, I hardly realised how completely she would 
have passed away from me. I thought of her for a little 
while with some regret; then I remembered Stradivarius, 
and I could not be sorry long. So by degrees I ceased 
to think of her. 

I lived on in Lady Greville's house, going with her, 
wherever she stayed — London, Paris, and Nice — until I 
was thirteen. Then she sent me away to study music at 
a small German capital, in the house of one of the few 
surviving pupils of Weber. We parted as we had lived 
together, without affection. 

Personally Lady Greville did not like me; if anything, 
she felt an actual repugnance towards me. All the care 
she lavished on me was for the sake of my talent, not for 
myself. She took a great deal of trouble in superintend- 
ing, not only my musical education, but my general cul- 
ture. She designed little mediaeval costumes for me, and 
was indefatigable in her endeavours to impart to my man- 
ners that finish which a gutter education had denied me. 

There is a charming portrait of me, by a well-known 
English artist, that hangs now in her ladyship's drawing- 
room. A pale boy of twelve, clad in an old-fashioned 
suit of ruby velvet; a boy with huge, black eyes, and 
long curls of the same colour, is standing by an oak 
music-stand, holding before him a Cremona violin, whose 
rich colouring is relieved admirably by the beautiful old 

(20s) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

point lace with which the boy's doublet is slashed. It is 
a charming picture. The famous artist who painted it 
considers it his best portrait, and Lady Greville is proud 
of it. 

But her pride is of the same quality as that which 
made her value my presence. I was in her eyes merely 
the complement of her famous fiddle. 

I heard her one day (express a certain feeling of relief 
at my approaching departure. 

'You regret having taken him up?' asked her nephew 
curiously. 

'No/ she said, 'that would be folly. He repays all 
one's trouble, as soon as he touches his fiddle — but I 
don't like him.' 

'He can play like the great Pan/ says Felix. 

'Yes, and like Pan he is half a beast.' 

'You may make a musician out of him,' answered the 
young man, examining his pink nails with a certain ad- 
miration, 'but you will never make him a gentleman.' 

'Perhaps not,' said Lady Greville carelessly. 'Still, 
Felix, he is very refined.' 

Dame! I think he would own himself mistaken now. 
Mr. Felix Leominster himself is not a greater social suc- 
cess than the Baron Antonio Antonelli, of the Legion of 
Honour. I am as sensitive as any one to the smallest 
spot on my linen, and Duchesses rave about my charm- 
ing manners. 

For the rest my souvenirs are not very numerous. I 
lived in Germany until I made my debut, and I never 
heard anything more of Ninette. 

The history of my life is very much the history of my 
art: and that you know. I have always been an art-con- 
centrated man — self-concentrated, my friend Felix Leo- 
minster tells me frankly — and since I was a boy nothing 
has ever troubled the serene repose of my egoism. 

(206) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

It is strange considering the way people rant about the 
'passionate sympathy' of my playing, the 'enormous po- 
tentiality of suffering' revealed in my music, how singu- 
larly free from passion and disturbance my life has been. 

I have never let myself be troubled by what is com- 
monly called 'love.' To be frank with you, I do not 
much believe in it. Of the two principal elements of 
which it is composed, vanity and egoism, I have too little 
of the former, too much of the latter, too much coldness 
withal in my character to suffer from it. My life has 
been notoriously irreproachable. I figure in polemical 
literature as an instance of a man who has lived in con- 
tact with the demoralising influence of the stage, and 
will yet go to Heaven. A la bonne heure! 

I am coming to the end of my souvenirs and of my 
cigar at the same time. I must convey a coin some- 
how to that dreary person outside, who is grinding now 
half-way down the street. 

On consideration, I decide emphatically against open- 
ing the window and presenting it that way. If the fog 
once gets in, it will utterly spoil me for any work this 
evening. I feel myself in travail also of two charming 
little Lieder that all this thinking about Ninette has sug- 
gested. How would 'Chansons de Gamine' do for a title? 
I think it best, on second thoughts, to ring for Giacomo, 
my man, and send him out with the half-crown I propose 
to sacrifice on the altar of sentiment. Doubtless the mu- 
sician is a country-woman of his, and if he pockets the 
coin, that is his look out. 

Now if I was writing a romance, what a chance I have 
got. I should tell you how my organ-grinder turned out 
to be no other than Ninette. Of course she would not 
be spoilt or changed by the years — just the same Ninette. 
Then what scope for a pathetic scene of reconciliation 
and forgiveness — the whole to conclude with a peal of 

(207) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

marriage bells, two people living together 'happy ever 
after.' But I am not writing a romance, and I am a 
musician, not a poet. 

Sometimes, however, it strikes me that I should like to 
see Ninette again, and I find myself seeking traces of 
her in childish faces in the street. 

The absurdity of such an expectation strikes me very 
forcibly afterwards, when I look at my reflection in the 
glass, and tell myself that I must be careful in the dis- 
position of my parting. 

Ninette, too, was my contemporary. Still I cannot 
conceive of her as a woman. To me she is always a 
child. Ninette grown up, with a draggled dress and 
squalling babies, is an incongruous thing that shocks my 
sense of artistic fitness. My fiddle is my only mistress, 
and while I can summon its consolation at command, I 
may not be troubled by the pettiness of a merely hu- 
man love. But once when I was down with Roman fever, 
and tossed on a hotel bed, all the long, hot night, while 
Giacomo drowsed in a corner over 'II Diavolo Rosa,' I 
seemed to miss Ninette. 

Remembering that time, I sometimes fancy that when 
the inevitable hour strikes, and this hand is too weak to 
raise the soul of melody out of Stradivarius — when, my 
brief dream of life and music over, I go down into the 
dark land, where there is no more music, and no Ninette, 
into the sleep from which there comes no awaking, I 
should like to see her again, not the woman but the 
child. I should like to look into the wonderful eyes of 
the old Ninette, to feel the soft cheek laid against mine, 
to hold the little brown hands, as in the old gamin days. 

It is a foolish thought, because I am not forty yet, and 
with the moderate life I lead I may live to play Stradi- 
varius for another thirty years. 

There is always the hope, too, that it, when it comes, 
(208) 



SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST 

may seize me suddenly, To see it coming, that is the 
horrible part. I should like to be struck by lightning, 
with you in my arms, Stradivarius, oh, my beloved — to 
die playing. 

The literary gentleman over my head is stamping 
viciously about his room. What would his language be 
if he knew how I have rewarded his tormentress — he 
whose principles are so strict that he would bear the 
agony for hours, sooner than give a barrel-organ sixpence 
to go to another street. He would be capable of giving 
Giacomo a sovereign to pocket my coin, if he only knew. 
Yet I owe that unmusical old organ a charming evening, 
tinged with the faint soupgon of melancholy which is 
necessary to and enhances the highest pleasure. Over 
the memories it has excited I have smoked a pleasant 
cigar — peace to its ashes! 



(209) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

During five years of an almost daily association with 
Michael Garth, in a solitude of Chili, which threw us, 
men of common speech, though scarcely of common in- 
terests, largely on each other's tolerance, I had grown, 
if not into an intimacy with him, at least into a certain 
familiarity, through which the salient feature of his his- 
tory, his character reached me. It was a singular charac- 
ter, and an history rich in instruction. So much I gath- 
ered from hints, which he let drop long before I had 
heard the end of it. Unsympathetic as the man was to 
me, it was impossible not to be interested by it. As our 
acquaintance advanced, it took (his character I mean) 
more and more the aspect of a difficult problem in psy- 
chology, that I was passionately interested in solving: 
to study it was my recreation, after watching the fluctu- 
ating course of nitrates, ^o that when I had achieved 
fortune, and might have started home immediately, my 
interest induced me to wait more than three months, 
and return in the same ship with him. It was through 
this delay that I am enabled to transcribe the issue of 
my impressions: I found them edifying, if only for their 
singular irony. 

From his own mouth indeed I gleaned but little; al- 
though during our voyage home, in those long nights 
when we paced the deck together under the Southern 
Cross, his reticence occasionally gave way, and I ob- 
tained glimpses of a more intimate knowledge of him 
than the whole of our juxtaposition on the station had 

(210) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

ever afforded me. I guessed more, however, than he 
told me; and what was lacking I pieced together later, 
from the talk of the girl to whom I broke the news of 
his death. He named her to me, for the first time, a day 
or two before that happened: a piece of confidence so 
unprecedented, that I must have been blind, indeed, not 
to have foreseen what it prefaced. I had seen her face 
the first time I entered his house, where her photograph 
hung on a conspicuous wall : the charming, oval face of a 
young girl, little more than a child, with great eyes, that 
one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of 
violets, looking out with singular wistfulness from a 
waving cloud of dark hair. Afterwards, he told me that 
it was the picture of his fiancee: but, before that, signs 
had not been wanting by which I had read a woman in 
his life. 

Iquique is not Paris; it is not even Valparaiso; but it 
is a city of civilisation; and but two days' ride from 
the pestilential stew, where we nursed our lives doggedly 
on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of evasion. The 
lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend works 
in the interior, are held on the same tenure: you know 
them by a certain savage, hungry look in their eyes. In 
the meantime, while they wait for their luck, most of 
them are glad enough when business calls them down for 
a day or two to Iquique. There are shops and streets, lit 
streets through which blackeyed Senoritas pass in their 
lace mantilas; there are cafes too; and faro for those who 
reck of it; and bull fights, and newspapers younger than 
six weeks; and in the harbour, taking in their fill of 
nitrates, many ships, not to be considered without envy, 
because they are coming, within a limit of days to Eng- 
land. But Iquique had no charm for Michael Garth, 
and when one of us must go, it was usually I, his sub- 
ordinate, who being delegated, congratulated myself on 

(211) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

his indifference. Hard-earned dollars melted at Iquique; 
and to Garth, life in Chili had long been solely a matter 
of amassing them. So he stayed on, in the prickly heat 
of Agnas Blancas, and grimly counted the days, and the 
money (although his nature, I believe, was fundamentally 
generous, in his set concentration of purpose, he had 
grown morbidly avaricious) which should restore him to 
his beautiful mistress. Morose, reticent, unsociable as 
he had become, he had still, I discovered by degrees, a 
leaning towards the humanities, a nice taste, such as 
could only be the result of much knowledge, in the fine 
things of literature. His infinitesimal library, a few 
French novels, an Horace, and some well thumbed vol- 
umes of the modern English poets in the familiar edi- 
tion of Tauchnitz, he put at my disposal, in return for 
a collection, somewhat similar, although a little larger, 
of my own. In his rare moments of amiability, he could 
talk on such matters with verve and originality: more 
usualty he preferred to pursue with the bitterest ani- 
mosity an abstract fetish which he called his "luck." He 
was by temperament an enraged pessimist; and I could 
believe, that he seriously attributed to Providence, some 
quality inconceivably malignant, directed in all things 
personally against himself. His immense bitterness and 
his careful avarice, alike, I could explain, and in a meas- 
ure justify, when I came to understand that he had felt 
the sharpest stings of poverty, and, moreover, was pas- 
sionately in love, in love comme on ne Vest plus. As to 
what his previous resources had been, I knew nothing, 
nor why they had failed him; but I gathered that the 
crisis had come, just when his life was complicated by 
the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love, 
in his case, at least, to be complete and final. The girl 
too was poor; they were poorer than most poor persons: 
how could he refuse the post, which, through the good 

(212) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

offices of a friend, was just then unexpectedly offered 
him? Certainly, it was abroad; it implied five years' 
solitude in Equatorial America. Separation and change 
were to be accounted; perhaps, diseases and death, and 
certainly his 'luck,' which seemed to include all these. 
But it also promised, when the term of his exile was up, 
and there were means of shortening it, a certain com- 
petence, and very likely wealth; escaping those other 
contingencies, marriage. There seemed no other way. 
The girl was "very young: there was no question of an 
early marriage; there was not even a definite engage- 
ment. Garth would take no promise from her: only for 
himself, he was her bound lover while he breathed; would 
keep himself free to claim her, when he came back 
in five years, or ten, or twenty, if she had not chosen 
better. He would not bind her; but I can imagine how 
impressive his dark, bitter face must have made this re- 
nunciation to the little girl with the violet eyes; how 
tenderly she repudiated her freedom. She went out as a 
governess, and sat down to wait. And absence only rivet- 
ted faster the chain of her affection: it set Garth more 
securely on the pedestal of her idea; for in love it is 
most usually the reverse of that social maxim, les absents 
ont toujours tort, which is true. 

Garth, on his side, writing to her, month by month, 
while her picture smiled on him from the wall, if he 
was careful always to insist on her perfect freedom, 
added, in effect, so much more than this, that the re- 
nunciation lost its benefit. He lived in a dream of her; 
and the memory of her eyes and her hair was a perpetual 
presence with him, less ghostly than the real company 
among whom he mechanically transacted his daily busi- 
ness. Burnt away and consumed by desire of her living 
arms, he was counting the hours which still prevented 
him from them. Yet, when his five years were done, he 

(213) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

delayed his return, although his economies had justified 
it; settled down for another term of five years, which 
was to be prolonged to seven. Actually, the memory of 
his old poverty, with its attendant dishonours, was grown 
a fury, pursuing him ceaselessly with whips. The lust 
of gain, always for the girl's sake, and so, as it were, 
sanctified, had become a second nature to him; an inti- 
mate madness, w r hich left him no peace. His worst night- 
mare was to wake with a sudden shock, imagining that 
he had lost everything, that he was reduced to his former 
poverty: a cold sweat would break all over him before 
he had mastered the horror. The recurrence of it, time 
after time, made him vow grimly, that he would go home 
a rich man, rich enough to laugh at the fantasies of his 
luck. Latterly, indeed, this seemed to have changed; 
so that his vow was fortunately kept. He made money 
lavishly at last: all his operations were successful, even 
those which seemed the wildest gambling: and the most 
forlorn speculations turned round, and shewed a pretty 
harvest, when Garth meddled with their stock. 

And all the time he was waiting there, and scheming, 
at Agnas Blancas, in a feverish concentration of himself 
upon his ultimate reunion with the girl at home, the man 
ivas growing old: gradually at first, and insensibly; but 
towards the end, by leaps and starts, with an increasing 
consciousness of how he aged and altered, which did but 
feed his black melancholy. It was borne upon him, 
perhaps, a little brutally, and not by direct self-examina- 
tion, when there came another photograph from England. 
A beautiful face still, but certainly the face of a woman, 
who had passed from the grace of girlhood (seven years 
now separated her from it), to a dignity touched with 
sadness: a face, upon which life had already written some 
of its cruelties. For many days after this arrival, Garth 
was silent and moody, even beyond his wont: then he 

(214) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

studiously concealed it. He threw himself again furi- 
ously into his economic battle; he had gone back to the 
inspiration of that other, older portrait: the charming, 
oval face of a young girl, almost a child, with great eyes, 
that one guessed one knew not why, to be the colour of 
violets. 

As the time of our departure approached, a week or 
two before we had gone down to Valparaiso, where Garth 
had business to wind up, I was enabled to study more 
intimately the morbid demon which possessed him= It 
was the most singular thing in the world: no man had 
hated the country more, had been more passionately de- 
termined for a period of years to escape from it; and 
now that his chance was come the emotion with which 
he viewed it was nearer akin to terror than to the joy 
of a reasonable man who is about to compass the desire 
of his life. He had kept the covenant which he had made 
jwith himself; he was a rich man, richer than he had 
ever meant to be. Even now he was full of vigour, and 
not much past the threshold of middle age, and he was 
going home to the woman whom for the best part of fif- 
teen years he had adored with an unexampled constancy, 
whose fidelity had been to him all through that exile as 
the shadow of a rock in a desert land: he was going home 
to an honourable marriage. But withal he was a man 
with an incurable sadness; miserable and afraid. It 
seemed to me at times that he would have been glad if 
she had kept her troth less well, had only availed her- 
self of that freedom which he gave her, to disregard her 
promise. And this was the more strange in that I never 
doubted the strength of his attachment; it remained en- 
grossing and unchanged, the largest part of his life. No 
alien shadow had ever come between him and the mem- 
ory of the little girl with the violet eyes, to whom he at 
least was bound. But a shadow was there; fantastic it 

(215). 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

seemed to me at first, too grotesque to be met with argu- 
ment, but in whose very lack of substance, as I came to 
see, lay its ultimate strength. The notion of the woman, 
which now she was, came between him and the girl whom 
he had loved, whom he still loved with passion, and sep- 
arated them. It was only on our voyage home, when we 
walked the deck together interminably during the hot, 
sleepless nights, that he first revealed to me without sub- 
terfuge, the slow agony by which this phantom slew him. 
And his old bitter conviction of the malignity of his luck, 
which had lain dormant in the first flush of his material 
prosperity, returned to him. The apparent change in it 
seemed to him just then, the last irony of those hostile 
powers which had pursued him. 

'It came to me suddenly,' he said, 'just before I left 
Agnas, when I had been adding up my pile and saw 
there was nothing to keep me, that it was all wrong. I 
had been a blamed fool ! I might have gone home years 
ago. Where is the best of my life? Burnt out, wasted, 
buried in that cursed oven! Dollars? If I had all the 
metal in Chili, I couldn't buy one day of youth. Her 
youth too; that has gone with the rest; that's the worst 
part!' 

Despite all my protests, his despondency increased as 
the steamer ploughed her way towards England, with 
the ceaseless throb of her screw, which was like the pant- 
ing of a great beast. Once, when we had been talking 
of other matters, of certain living poets whom he fa- 
voured, he broke off with a quotation from the Trince's 
Progress' of Miss Rossetti: 

'Ten years ago, five years ago, 

One year ago, 
Even then you had arrived in time, 

Though somewhat slow; 
Then you had known her living face 

Which now you cannot know.' 

(216) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

He stopped sharply, with a tone in his voice which 
seemed to intend, in the lines, a personal instance. 

'I beg your pardon!' I protested. 'I don't see the 
analogy. You haven't loitered; you don't come too late. 
A brave woman has waited for you; you have a fine 
felicity before you: it should be all the better, because 
you have won it laboriously. For heaven's sake, be rea- 
sonable! ' He shook his head sadly; then added, with a 
gesture of sudden passion, looking out over the taffrail, at 
the heaving gray waters: 'It's finished. I haven't any 
longer the courage.' 'Ah!' I exclaimed impatiently, 
say once for all, outright, that you are tired of her, that 
you want to back out of it.' 'No,' he said drearily, 
'it isn't that. I can't reproach myself with the least 
wavering. I have had a single passion; I have given 
my life to it; it is there still, consuming me. Only the 
girl I loved: it's as if she had died. Yes, she is dead, 
as dead as Helen: and I have not the consolation of 
knowing where they have laid her. Our marriage will 
be a ghastly mockery: a marriage of corpses. Her 
heart, how can she give it me? She gave it years ago to 
the man I was, the man who is dead. We, who are left, 
are nothing to one another, mere strangers.' 

One could not argue with a perversity so infatuate: it 
was useless to point out, that in life a distinction so ar- 
bitrary as the one which haunted him does not exist. 
It was only left me to wait, hoping that in the actual 
event of their meeting, his malady would be healed. But 
this meeting, would it ever be compassed? There were 
moments when his dread of it seemed to have grown so 
extreme, that he would be capable of any cowardice, any 
compromise to postpone it, to render it impossible. He 
was afraid that she would read his revulsion in his eyes, 
would suspect how time and his very constancy had 
given her the one rival with whom she could never com- 

(217) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

pete; the memory of her old self, of her gracious girlhood, 
which was dead. Might not she too, actually, welcome a 
reprieve; however readily she would have submitted out 
of honour or lassitude, to a marriage which could only 
be a parody of what might have been? 

At Lisbon, I hoped that he had settled these questions, 
had grown reasonable and sane, for he wrote a long let- 
ter to her which was subsequently a matter of much 
curiosity to me; and he wore, for a day or two afterwards, 
an air almost of assurance which deceived me. I won- 
dered what he had put in that epistle, how far he had ex- 
plained himself, justified his curious attitude. Or was 
it simply a resume, a conclusion to those many letters 
which he had written at Agnas Blancas, the last one 
which he would ever address to the little girl of the 
earlier photograph? 

Later, I would have given much to decide this, but 
she herself, the woman who read it, maintained unbroken 
silence. In return, I kept a secret from her, my private 
Merpretation of the accident of his death. It seemed 
to ine a knowledge tragical enough for her, that he should 
have died as he did, so nearly in English waters; within 
a few days of the home coming, which they had pas- 
sionately expected for years. 

It would have been mere brutality to afflict her further, 
by lifting the veil of obscurity, which hangs over that 
calm, moonless night, by pointing to the note of intention 
in it. For it is in my experience, that accidents so oppor- 
tune do not in real life occur, and I could not forget 
that, from Garth's point of view, death was certainly 
a solution. Was it not, moreover, precisely a solution, 
which so little time before he had the appearance of 
having found? Indeed when the first shock of his death 
was past, I could feel that it was after all a solution: 
with his 'luck' to handicap him, he had perhaps avoided 

(218) 



THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS 

worse things than the death he met. For the luck of 
such a man, is it not his temperament, his character? 
Can any one escape from that? May it not have been 
an escape for the poor devil himself, an escape too for 
the woman who loved him, that he chose to drop down, 
fathoms down, into the calm, irrecoverable depths of the 
Atlantic, when he did, bearing with him at least an un- 
spoilt ideal, and leaving her a memory that experience 
could never tarnish, nor custom stale? 



THE END 



f2TO> 



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A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISMS (81) 

Edited with an Introduction by 
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ANDREYEV, LEONID (1871- ) 

The Seven That Were Hanged and The Red 
Laugh (45) 

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ATHERTON, GERTRUDE 
Rezanov (71) 

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BALZAC, HONORE DE (1799-1850) 
Short Stories (40) 

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BEARDSLEY, THE ART OF AUBREY (1872-1898) 
64 Black and White Reproductions (42) 

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BEERHOHM, MAX (1872- ) 
Zuleika Dob son (50) 

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BEST GHOST STORIES (73) 

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BEST HUMOROUS AMERICAN SHORT 
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Edited with an Introduction by 
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Edited with an Introduction by 
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BUTLER, SAMUEL (1835-1902) 

The Way of All Flesh (13) 
CARPENTER, EDWARD (1844- ) 

Love Coming of Age (51) 

CHEKHOV, ANTON (1860-1904) 

Rothschild's Fiddle and Thirteen Other 
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The Flame of Life (65) 

DAUDET, ALPHONSE (1840-1897) 
Sapho (85) 

In same volume with Prevost's "Manon 
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DOSTOYEVSKY, FEDOR (1821-1881) 
Poor People (10) 

Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER 

DOWSON, ERNEST (1867-1900) 
Poems and Prose (74) 

Introduction by ARTHUR SYMO'NS 

DUNSANY, LORD (Edward John Plunkett) 

(1878- ) 

A Dreamer's Tales (34) 

Introduction by PADRIAC COLUM 
Book of Wonder (43) 

EVOLUTION IN MODERN THOUGHT (37) 

A Symposium, including Essays by Haeckel, 
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FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (1821-1880) 
Madame Bovary (28) 

FRANCE, ANATOLE (1844- ) 

The Red Lily (7) 

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (22) 
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Mile, de Maupin (53) 

GEORGE, W. L. (1882- ) 
A Bed of Roses (75) 

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The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, 
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GISSING, GEORGE (1857-1903) 

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (46) 
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Renee Mauperin (76) 

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Creatures That Once Were Men and Four 
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HARDY, THOMAS (1840- ) 

The Mayor of Casterbridge (17) 

Introduction by JOYCE KILMER 

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (1837- ) 
A Hazard of New Fortunes (25) 

■Introduction by ALEXANDER HARVEY 

IBANEZ, VICENTE BLASCO (1867- ) 
The Cabin (69) 

Introduction by 

JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL 

IBSEN, HENRIK (1828-1906) 

A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the 
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The Master Builder (36) 

Introduction by H. L. MENCKEN 
The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The League of 
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JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916) 

Daisy Miller and An International Episode (63) 

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KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865- ) 
Soldiers Three (3) 

LATZKO, ANDREAS (1876- ) 
Men in War (88) 

MACY, JOHN (1877- ) 

The Spirit of American Literature (56) 

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Interior, The Intruder (11) 

De MAUPASSANT, GUY (1850-1893) 
Love and Other Stories (72) 

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Mademoiselle Fifi, and Twelve Other Stories (8) 
Une Vie (57) 

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MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1909) 
Diana of the Crossways (14) 

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MOORE, GEORGE (1853- ) 

Confessions of a Young Man (16) 

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NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844-1900) 
Thus Spake Zarathustra (9) 

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FRAU FOERSTER-NIETZSCHE 
Beyond Good and Evil (20) 

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WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT 
Genealogy of Morals (62) 

NORRIS, FRANK (1870-1902) 
McTeague (60) 

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PATER, WALTER (1839-1894) 
The Renaissance (86) 

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PREVOST, ANTOINE FRANCOIS (1697-1763) 
Manon Lescaut (85) 

In same volume with Daudet's Sapho 

RODIN, THE ART OF (1840-1917) 

64 Black and White Reproductions (41) 

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ROOSEVELT, THEODORE (1858-1919) 

Selected Addresses and Public Papers (78) 

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SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR (1862- ) 

Anatol, Living Hours, The Green Cockatoo (32) 

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Bertha Garlan (39) 

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1738-1860) 
Studies in Pessimism (12) 

Introduction by T. B. SAUNDERS 

SHAW, G. B. (1856- ) 

An Unsocial Socialist (15) 



Modern Library of the World's Best Books 

SINCLAIR, MAY 
The Belfry (68) 

STEPHENS, JAMES 
Mary, Mary (30) 

Introduction by PADRIAICCOLUM 

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-1894V 
Treasure Island (4) 

STIRNER, MAX (Johann Caspar Schmidt) 
(1806-1856) 

The Ego and His Own (49) 

STRINDBERG, AUGUST (1849-1912) 

Married (2) 

Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER 
Miss Julie, The Creditor, The Stronger Woman, 

Motherly Love, Paria, Simoon (52) 

SUDERMANN, HERMANN (1857- ) 
Dame Care (33) 

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES 

(1837-1909) 

Poems (23) 

Introduction by ERNEST RHYS 

THOMPSON, FRANCIS (1859-1907) 
Complete Poems (38) 

TOLSTOY, LEO (1828-1910) 

Redemption and Two Other Plays (77) 

Introduction by ARTHUR HOPKINS 
The Death of Ivan Ilyitcb and Four Other 
Stories (64) 

TRAUBEL, HORACE (1858- ) 
Chants Communal (79) 

Special Introduction by the author for this 
edition 

TURGENEV, IVAN (1818-1883) 
Fathers and Sons (21) 

Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER 
Smoke (80) 

Introduction by JOHN REED 

VILLON, FRANCOIS (1431-1461) 
Poems (58) 

Introduction by JOHN PAYNE 



Modern Library of the World's Best Books 

VOLTAIRE, (FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET) 

(1694-1778) 

Candide (47) 

Introduction by PHILIP LITTELL 

WELLS, H. G. (1866- ) 
The War in the Air (5) 

New Preface by H. G. Wells for this edition 
Ann Veronica (27) 

WILDE, OSCAR (1856-1900) 
Dorian Gray (1) 
Poems (19) 

Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose (61) 
Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest, 
Lady Windermere's Fan (83) 

Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS 
An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No 
Importance (84) 

WILSON, WOODROW (1856- ) 
Selected Addresses and Public Papers (55) 

Edited with an Introduction bv 
ALBERT BUSHNELL HART 

WOMAN QUESTION, THE (59) 

A Symposium, including Essays by Ellen Key, 
Havelock Ellis, G. Lowes Dickinson, etc. 

Edited by T. .R.SMITH 

YEATS, W. B. (1865- ) 

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (44) 



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